The Internet has transformed every aspect of health care. Online communities provide new forms of support for people with a thousand different medical conditions. Email has streamlined communication between stakeholders in the system. Electronic medical records and social networking sites hold a wealth of data that can be leveraged to study the effects of various treatments.

The most significant advance however, has been the ease with which people can access information about their health. As many as 74% of all people search for information about their symptoms and treatments online, and many of these information-empowered people now see physicians as guides to and interpreters of this information, a far cry from the era in which passive patients presented symptoms and relied on paternalistic physicians to act in their best interests.

But there are problems with the new paradigm, just as there were with the one it replaced. Online health information can be incomplete, biased, lacking for proper context or flat-out inaccurate. And not everyone, especially those without a medical background, can sort through these deficiencies in a way that assures they are properly informed.

A recent study by Alexander van Deursen and Jan van Dijk of the University of Twente has quantified these problems. The scientists used performance tests to assess health-related Internet search and other online skills in a representative sample of the people in the Netherlands.

Their tests focused on four types of skills:
Operational-These included basic internet skills like opening a health website, saving a PDF file and adding a website to a list of “favorites.”
Formal-These included navigating health-related menus and websites, and surfing a list of websites.
Finding Information-These included accessing specific information regarding medical conditions and answering specific questions like whether it is appropriate to begin a treatment after being infected with a particular germ.
Strategic-These included extracting information from different sources and making decisions based on the information. For example, “find out whether it is wise to give a 3-year-old boy Vitamin A and D.” (more…)

Gain Fitness Launches iPhone App. Gain Fitness, a startup that creates personalized workouts based on certified trainers’ expertise, has launched an iPhone app that allows fitness enthusiasts to access to personal trainer quality exercise without having to research workouts or book expensive trainers.

Web Changing How People Recall Facts. Access to a wealth of information on the Internet is altering what people remember, prompting us to retain fewer facts but more information about how to find those facts, say scientists at Harvard and Columbia.

Second-Hand Smoke Tied to ADHD. Researchers found that of more than 55,000 US children younger than age 12, 6% lived with a smoker. Those kids were more likely to have attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) than children living in smoke-free homes.

Florida Pain Doctor Suspended; 34 Patients Dead. Dr. Joseph Hernandez was suspended earlier this month by the Florida Department of Health for overprescribing opiate painkillers. Of the 761 patients Hernandez saw between January and April 2011, 34 have died.

When Medicaid Paid Better, Kids Had More Dental Visits. When dentists were reimbursed more for preventive visits, kids on Medicaid ended up in their chairs more often, probably because the increased compensation made them more willing to accept those patients, a government researcher said.

Regional Patient ID Pilot Could Presage a National Rollout . The idea of a national patient identifier has gone nowhere, but a regional health information organization in LA has begun testing a regional patient ID system with financial help from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Practice Fusion’s Electronic Health Record System Achieves Complete Meaningful Use Certification. The largest EHR community in the US is now ONC-certified. Practice Fusion’s national network of small medical practices has the potential to earn over $1 billion in incentives.

iCloud, Cloud Computing Services Promise To Change the Way We Use Computers. Apple has announced a free service that allows consumers to store vast amounts of music, video, photos and documents on the Web, one of several emerging offerings that reduce the need for a computer.

Computerized Communication Breakdowns Common Between PCPs, Specialists. A new study investigates the challenges posed by pen and paper workarounds and computerized communication breakdowns associated with electronic health records. Understanding the challenges can help improve coordination of care.

Blumenthal To Chair Commonwealth Fund Commission. David Blumenthal, the former head of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology at HHS, has been named chairman of the Commonwealth Fund’s Commission on a High Performance Health System.

One-Third of Hospital ERs Have Closed in Past 20 Years. From 1990 to 2009, the number of hospital emergency departments in non-rural areas in the US declined by 27%, according to a study in this week’s JAMA.

iPhone ‘Rewards’ Help Teens with Glucose Control. Giving teens iTunes cash in return for taking blood glucose measurements via a smartphone app seems to be working in a new pilot project at the University of Toronto.

More Docs Using Video Chat for Routine Follow-Up Visits. A full 7% of physicians are using video-conferencing to talk with patients, according to new data from Manhattan Research.

Florida REC Reaches Hundreds with EHR Help. More than 700 Florida providers have enrolled in the Center for the Advancement of Health IT, a REC program that will help them implement EHRs and achieve Meaningful Use.

US Reserves Right To Respond Militarily to Cyberattacks. The declaration came in a new White House international cyberspace strategy document which also covers issues including the free flow of information, foreign assistance and cybercrime.

DOJ Decries Lack of Internet Protocol Data From Smartphones. Amid a national uproar over the belated, surprising news that mobile devices track your whereabouts, the Justice Department has expressed unhappiness with its inability to access such data.

Bandwidth Speed Limits Smartphone Use for Diagnostic Imaging. Researchers in Calgary are suggesting that the frame rate associated with 3G cellular networks is insufficient for practical use in viewing radiology images.

Primary Care Still Hard to Find in the Bay State. More than half the primary care practices in Massachusetts don’t accept new patients, and wait times for new patients continue to lengthen 5 years after the state passed its landmark healthcare reform law.

High-volume Hospitals Recommended for High-Risk Heart Transplants. Older, sicker heart-transplant patients are more likely to survive for one year after surgery if they were treated at hospitals that do a lot of transplants, a study showed.

Health Consumers Trust Traditional News over Social Media. A new poll shows that most people trust health and medical research information provided by traditional news sources more than that provided by social media and mobile devices.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), “the cloud” for many, experienced a serious interruption in service beginning on April 21st. The problem lingered for at least 6 days. Many websites that relied on Amazon services went down or saw their performance degraded during the event.

The AWS failure disproportionately affected startups like Foursquare, Quora and Reddit, companies that are “focused on moving fast in pursuit of growth, and less apt to pay for extensive backup and recovery services.” 

One of the affected companies was a health care startup. What follows is a transcription (including typos) of an AWS Discussion Forum that this company initiated 24 hours after the outage began. The company’s contributions are in italics.

Life of our patients is at stake—I am desperately asking you to contact

Sorry I could not get through in any other way. We are a monitoring company and are monitoring hundreds of cardiac patients at home. We are unable to see their ECG signals since 21st of April. Can you please contact us? Or please let me know how can I contact you more ditectly. Thank you
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Oh this is not good. Man mission critical systems should never be run in the cloud. Just because AWS is HIPPA certified doesn’t mean it won’t go down for 48+ hours in a row.

(+30 minutes since comment thread began) Well, it is supposed to be reliable…
Anyway, I am begging anyone from Amazon team to contact us directly. Thank you
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Go to your backups? Or make a big deal out of it on the forums maybe someone will take a look. In any case anecdotal empirical evidence has shown don’t bother with premium support its a freaking joke.
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Thanks for the comments, but we are really desparate. Amazon team – please contact us
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(+10 hours since comment thread began) Not restored. Not heard from Amazon. People out there – please take a look at our volumes! This not just some social network website issue, but a serious threat to peoples lives!
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Your only option at this point is Premium support. However, they’re just going to tell you to wait. Sorry.
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(+ 13 hours) There is some progress. 2 servers are operational and one still not working. Unfortunately, the one on which we have the most patients
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Aren’t you braking some compliance laws by not having a highly-available environment?
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You put a life critical system on virtual hosted servers? What the hell is wrong with you
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Not sure whether you’re plain incompetent or irresponsible. Anyway, you should be ashamed and prepare yourself with lots of money to pay for the lawyers. Would it be so difficult to have a contingency plan? another provider? or even another availability zone? Are you so fsklong dumb as to think that nothing could ever happen to a data center. (more…)

iPhone To Dominate US Physician Smartphone Market. In a recent survey, 61% of US physicians said they intend to own an iPhone by year-end, 2011. That’s up from 39% at the beginning of the year. Among US smartphone users overall, 25% own iPhones.

CDC Offers $35,000 in Prizes for Best Flu Educational Applications. Awards will go to developers who create the best mobile or Web applications that educate the public about influenza prevention.

Indiana to Cut Planned Parenthood Funding. Republican Governor Mitch Daniels plans to sign restrictive abortion legislation and make Indiana the first state to cut off all government funding for Planned Parenthood.

Hair Loss Prevention Robot Approved by FDA. The Artas System, by Restoration Robotics, identifies and harvests permanent hair follicles which can then be implanted manually where needed.

HHS Launches Value-Based Purchasing Program. The program will reward hospitals for the quality of care they provide to Medicare beneficiaries. Measures to determine quality will focus on how closely hospitals follow best clinical practices and utilize health information technology.

Vermont Senate Approves Single-Payer Health Care. The state is on track to become the first one in the nation to offer a single-payer system and universal health coverage.

Wolters Kluwer in Deal to Acquire Lexi-Comp. Drug information provider Lexi-Comp is the latest of several WK acquisitions that have focused on providing decision support at the point-of-care. 
 
Apple Responds to the Furor over iPhone Data Tracking. The company states unequivocally that it has never, and will never track the location of a customer’s iPhone.

Guantanamo Docs Neglected, Concealed Medical Evidence of Torture. The evidence includes bone fractures, lacerations, and symptoms of post- traumatic stress disorder, according to Physicians for Human Rights.

Convicted Rapist Next in Line for a Heart Transplant. New York taxpayers would pick up the $800,000 tab.

New Health Wonk Review is Posted! ‘Spring Has Sprung and Mud Still Flung’ edition, created by the folks over at The Incidental Economist. Features @Pizaazz post on Alzheimer’s guidelines.

Amazon’s Trouble Raises Cloud Computing Doubts. Problems with the cloud-based service are likely to prompt startups like Foursquare, Quora, Reddit and BigDoor to reconsider their reliance on such systems. 

How Harvard Medical Manages Students’ Mobile Applications. Of note, the most frequently downloaded clinical applications by the students were Dynamed, uCentral, VisualDx, Epocrates Essentials, and iRadiology.

The Furor over Apple’s Location Database. Though you might not know it, Apple stores your location data in a file on your iPhone. Someone can access this data (from a stolen phone, say) and use it to determine where you’ve been, and when.

Rx for Secondary Prevention May Not Save Money. Statins and anti-hypertensives may, or may not be cost-effective in patients with known cardiovascular disease. We need studies to find out.

How Social Media Will Change Mental Health Care. The quality of care will improve in myriad ways, and the stigma and isolation of mental illness will lessen, according to a psychologist.

Drunk driving continues to be a serious problem. In 2009 for example, alcohol was a factor in more than 10,000 highway deaths. The same year, a stunning 10% of respondents to a survey of US adults said they had operated an automobile while drunk during the previous year. Nearly 6% said they had done it more than once.

So how would you feel about a car that can instantly detect whether a driver is drunk and prevent that person from starting the car?

You better make up your mind quickly, because scientists are close to perfecting this technology.

“We’re five to seven years away from being able to integrate this into cars,” Robert Strassburger, the VP for safety at the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers told the Washington Post. The AAM, an automotive trade group, is on the development team for the new technology which is being spearheaded by the Automotive Coalition for Traffic Safety and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

The anticipated sensing device will look nothing like the breathalyzer machines currently used by police in the field. Instead, it will be comprised of tiny, passive, touch-sensitive sensors that are permanently affixed to a key fob or a starter button. The sensors can determine blood alcohol levels in seconds.

From a technical standpoint, the biggest challenge is to craft a sensor that analyses and responds to tactile information within about a third of a second. Current versions of the sensor take 20-30 seconds to do this. Team members are confident however, that advancements in solid-state electronics and infrared technology will help them achieve their goal.

After that lies the most nettlesome problem of all. Will car buyers purchase vehicles with these devices? Obviously, cost will be a concern, but more important will be the fears people have that the newly empowered vehicles will prevent them from driving home after enjoying a drink or two. (more…)