Web 2.0 and Medicine

In medicine there is a lot more money involved, a lot more ethics involved, and it is not a case that from Lancet it was where a strong opposition from the traditional and conservative oligopolistic Elsevier attack was launched, by funding

http://www.plos.org/   is a hugely growing nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource.

But in fact you know this, isn't this why we are trying to reach NIH kind of money with mechanics idea?  We want to enter this rich world, also for its more direct usefulness for humanity. 

michele ciavarella
www.micheleciavarella.it

Michelle,

Having spent 13 weeks with two of my children (nine for the first and four for the second) in the neonatal ICU, and my daughter already having nine surgeries with another one coming Tuesday, I can say for certain that in practice medicine is behind the times with technology.  With education, I think they are probably about equals.

For example, it was only about two years ago that we stopped having to carry 'film' from the labs to the clinics (and this was at Penn State's Hershey Medical Center/School).  Most medical records are still hand-written as this is still the fastest, most convenient, and private-from-the-patient way for doctors to take notes.  Most hospital charts are still hand written.  In fact, for the first time I saw charts kept electronically (using unique barcodes on medical bracelets) when my wife was recently (a month ago) recovering from a c-section at our small local hospital.  Hershey Medical Center still records everything by hand.

Voice recorders were adopted pretty early by doctors but they just replaced tape recorders for dictating notes.  The problem with these is that doctors don't always want the patient to hear what they're thinking.  PDAs were adopted quite early and quite a few PalmOS applications were written with doctors in mind.  In fact, I think one of the iPhone applications Apple demoed was aimed at the medical community.

There is also a lot of work in developing haptic surgical trainers for medical students and continued training.  In fact I was once pursuing some work with surgeons about developing a computer model of the liver that students could interact with, i.e. cut, suture, and probe, through a haptic endoscope.  Nothing came of it but it was an interesting issue on which I know many MD/PhDs are working.  Real-time haptics are quite computationally intensive since you need a refresh rate of about 10ms.

I'd say in education, the medical community uses technology about like and to the extent we do. 

Regarding the use of the web '2.0' it is really about where 1.9 ends and 2.0 starts. Other than the TinyMCE javascript editor used for composing messages, nothing in iMechanica counts as '2.0' in my view.  Blogs are really just the marriage of usenet and html.  I.e., we could have been having this very discussion 15 years ago in a usenet group.  I think 2.0-features start with sending and receiving 'micro-content' without having to refresh a lot of static data.  This allows for web applications, e.g. Google Apps.

As I've written before here and in two proposals to NSF (http://dssl.mne.psu.edu/nsfevo and http://dssl.mne.psu.edu/nsfcdi), I think recently (in the past five years) developed web technology finally enables interactive publishing.  I think the Living Review Articles concept in the 'nsfcdi' proposal is a good place to start with mechanics in the Web 2.0 world.

Eric Mockensturm