Talk:New Ideas for Site/Archive 1

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Needs more content and personal health management tools.
Should be clearer distinctions between mental health and medical disorders. i.e., "irritable bowel syndrome" and "multi-infact dementia" are not classified as mental disorders in the DSM-IV, and should not be classified as such on the OurMed site.

Health care patients would benefit from a search function where users can check off symptoms, similar to Web MD's "symptom checker".

A function allowing users to look up mental health disorders by DSM-IV and/or ICD-10 codes would be useful for clinicians.

The alcohol and substance use disorders section is currently empty. I am a qualified health professional and published author with a clinical speciality in addiction treatment, and can write it, if you like.

The section on Major Depression is good, but a bit uneven. A disproportionate amount of space is given to alternative and experimental treatments for example. There should be more information on the practice of managing depression with medication in a primary care setting also. Also: is OurMed writing for medical professionals or laypeople? The article on Major Depression reads as though it's written for mental health professionals, but the information is very basic and doesn't go into a lot of detail.

Obviously, I echo what was written above about the site needing more content. As the site grows and people begin using it more, I'm sure this problem will be solved.

My two cents.

jrzeth

Direct benefits to a patient.
An healthcare site should also have a function wherein a patient or a person suffering from an chronic ailment can register and then login to know more about the disease affecting him/her. Latest research and development on all the diseases should be mentioned there and the best possible or the best available treatment destination along with the expected cost of treatment.

Sanjiv yadav

My Suggestions:
A. we should Include more Technologies and Diagnostic techniques to cure diseases and how they work and their various side effects and so on.

B. as ourmed is a healthcare encyclopadea i have a concern that over the period of time when this platform will gain much more popularity and when there will be a high number of people using this not only for updating knowledge about Healthcare as well as for finding the ailments they are suffering from. there may be some who might try various preventive measures/ exercises mentioned in various articles. i know many people who have tried such suggestions/ remedies/ exercise available on internet without proper consultation with the physician which resulted in harm to them.so to make this portal more responsible we should have some sort of screening process so that we should be able to ensure that what's being mentioned in our articles should be relevant and appropriate as this is related to health of the users of ourmed.

C. to be more informative we can also have some sections on personalities/people/organizations which have revolutionized as well are bringing change in healthcare in different parts of the world e.g. WHO, GE Healthcare, AIIMS, etc...

Aman Kwatra

Great Site
I particularly liked the form "site contents" which categorizes the diseases according to body parts, activities or causes. This can be improved by having a section on symptoms mapping to diseases, which will be of great help to patients who don't know the medical name of the disease they might be having. This will help self-diagnosis of the diseases at an early stage.&lt;/span&gt;

Since, the site is in nascent stage its not a problem to have the links of the diseases on the main page. But as the content will grow, it will need a section like "specialized pages" having important links for a generic visitor. This section can have links to all articles and other information about the wiki.

General information about the diseases by name are present in other general wikis like Wikipedia. But the strength of this site is the specialized information. Hence, the articles on the diseases need to be more meticulous about the details such as recent trends of the disease, best specialized places for treatment, cheaper alternatives, etc. Moreover, the site can encourage blogs which talks about the patients experience with certain surgery or treatment they have undergone.

Information regarding healthcare is very critical and should be correct to best possible extent. The information put in the articles shall be based on credible research and should be verifiable. I am sure that the articles edited are reviewed thoroughly.

Along with the articles on diseases, the site should also include the articles on various treatments, surgeries and medications. Various specialized hospitals have very good online information of the details of the treatments they offer. These links can be incorporated in the articles.

Its important to publicize the site which can be done by Wiki Indexing, Wikia Spotlight and reaching to various healthcare communities.Today, if I enter say AIDS on Google then the Ourmed's article on the topic does not there appear in the search result. I think it takes a time for new site's pages to appear, but if Indexing of the site or some pages helps then why not try it? Also, the site deserves an article in a more frequently used encyclopedia.

Lastly, we can borrow some good ideas from other wikis which helps keeping the site fresh and up to date. Some interesting additions can be the sections like "Did you know?" as in Wikipedia. Or some relevant health information like update on an ongoing health initiative, pandemic, etc.

Sharad Maloo

Wiki Format Painter Tool
These are all great ideas. Of course we'll be adding a lot of features and tools with the Blueliner Phase 2 development (see video here), but just wanted to note how useful it would be to have a "format painter" like they have in MS Word.

~Gmiller

Local Remedies and Other Medical Practices
I beleive there are various local remedies and medical practises being followed in different parts of world like ayurveda, unani, homeopathy etc.

there should be articles that scientfically detail out the best practises being followed in these medical practises and evaluate their efficacy.

also articles highlighting the accessibility and use of bio informatics to promote these practises.

To increase the popularity of the site I guess we should start by encouraging more of the participation and also carry the website to other platforms or database rather then usung the wiki page.

But great job being done out here

Tarun Singhal

Ourmed:Symbiosis project
See the Ourmed:Symbiosis project page for the idea that I have been developing. Thanks!--Pharos 02:20, 13 January 2010 (UTC)

Ourmed policy development project
See the page Ourmed policy to contribute your ideas for policies to govern activities online at our site. Then go to the talk (discussion) page (here) and add your thoughts under the appropriate heading. (please click on the wikitext button first and only edit when it's blue). Savealife 20:02, 19 January 2010 (UTC)

Physician Credentialing
It's apparent that verifying Healthcare professionals will ensure critical elements that translate to user trust and accuracy of information. Below is an email from Jay Valinsky regarding ideas to address that:

I think that the challenge is the credentialing of physicians with international medical degrees and qualifications. In the US, there are of course several ways to check credentials, e.g.:

www.noah-health,.org (NY Online Access to Health) lists accediting agencies in all states I believe

www.fcmb.org and www.ama-assn.org may be additional sources

I think that this will just require some "grunt" work on the part of staff to verify these people. The alternative is outsource the services, but this is costly. It would be the equivalent of a new employee criminal background check.

I am sure that you have thought of these things as well.

My other concern is to verify the credentials of non-physician contributors (e.g. PhD scientists or other healthcare workers)

None of these methods will be fool proof

Jay E. Valinsky, PhD

Vice President, Information and Technology New York Blood Center 310 E. 67th Street New York, NY 10021 Gmiller23 January 2010 (UTC)

Main Page to list Medical Specialty Portal instead of list of Diseases
As Dr. Stephen Press has laboriously gone through all 200 diseases we have and categorized them, I think it makes more sense to get to the diseases by category first.

You can see this on Specialties

Gmiller 18:48, 1 March 2010 (UTC)