Wireless Messaging System Has No Impact on Blood Glucose Levels, but Patients Believe It Improves Quality of Care (…and their blood pressure was reduced)

26 May

Wireless Messaging System Has No Impact on Blood Glucose Levels, but Patients Believe It Improves Quality of Care - From the AHRQ Innovations Exchange. I thought the title of the Exchange article was interestingly different than the actual title of the study that it references, so I pulled the actual paper and read it. There was not a significant drop in HbA1c (a long term measure of diabetic control) after 3 months of the study, but half of the intervention patients who were hypertensive before the study were not after the study, a significant difference. I think that’s interesting, especially among patients with diabetes.

Beyond Blogs : Businessweek

26 May

Beyond Blogs : Businessweek - A refresh of Businessweek's landmark 2005 story about Social Media and businessweek. Interesting update: prediction of mass firings of employees who blog (being "Dooced") has not happened, with the exception of a few well publicized cases, like this one. Perhaps Web2.0 is subtly changing the expectation of transparency on the part of organizations and their customers - participation is becoming more of a norm.

26 May

Bioethics Forum - Google Health: Organizing Your Medical Information - Comment on this blog about a method to display drug/device ads to physicians reviewing a patient's medical record. Is this sort of thing different than a physician reviewing a medical record while writing with a branded pen on branded paper that sits in their office in front of their computer, next to their drug sample cabinet (if they allow these things in their practice). Shouldn’t the conversation be about being an unbranded doctor instead of Google’s implementation?