Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The easy and immediate publishing made them very popular. The posting of a clinical
photo from a digital camera or a mobile phone directly to a blog after optimisation
and commenting can be made at the touch of a button. Medical blog examples include
Clinical Cases and Images, Family Medicine Notes etc.
RSS
RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication." It is a standard format used to share con-
tent on the Internet. Many websites provide RSS "feeds" that describe their latest
news and updates. They play the role of newsletters but offer information in pieces, at
the moment it is created (feeds) and can be accessed by various devices and systems
grace to the standard format. The doctors' lounge, RSS for medics and Medical News
Today are a few medical RSS news syndication services. Most blogging services offer
the ability to create RSS feeds and an RSS reader is the only tool needed to process
this feed.
Audio and video podcasts
They can be employed similar to RSS for providing medical information on emerging
issues. Moreover, the power of image and the ease of listening instead of reading
make them ideal for the dissemination of medical information and for online courses.
In a project developed at St George's, University of London, UK, named Clinical
Skills Online (CSO) [8], online videos demonstrate core Clinical Skills common to a
wide range of medical and health-based courses in Higher Education. The video
courses are categorized by topic, by user's expertise and occupation and are available
to the public. The option of user feedback is available through a questionnaire and a
free text comments form. Other interesting examples include: the Annals of Internal
Medicine, the podcasts of the American College of Cardiology (Conversations with
Experts) and the vidcasts of Cleveland Clinic.
Wikis
Wikis are considered to replace content management applications by allowing users to
easily publish articles, images and video. They can start to cover the lack of free
online medical information and function as a repository of medical information that
could be readily accessed for reference. They are built and populated collaboratively
by domain experts and are accessible to patients, doctors or trainees and the public. In
a medical wiki, the group of editors creates and contributes with article reviews, dis-
ease definitions (symptoms, cure etc), clinical notes, medical images or video. Editors
have the ability to alter content published by other editors and have their articles ed-
ited by others hoping that the wiki will finally converge into a widely accepted final
version.
Social bookmarking
Medical bookmarking is aimed to promote the sharing of medical references mainly
amongst practitioners and researchers. Scientists can share information on academic
papers, are able to collaboratively catalog medical images with specific tools devel-
oped for that purpose. Article readers can organize their libraries, which can comprise
Medline articles, with freely chosen tags. The result is a multi-faceted taxonomy,
called folksonomy of tags (topics) and associated sources. Many medical information
Search WWH ::
Custom Search