5-29-10 Community E-Newsletter/Call

Hi Everyone, Today's call will bring you up to speed with our Phase2 web development, touch base on financial relationships between medicine and industry as well as looking at some of the trends with healthcare sites on the internet.

This is an open invitation to get more involved with the world's first ever, unbiased, free license and dynamic medical/health knowledge base. Time: Friday (Today!) 2 - 2:45pm EST Passcode: 634011# If you would like to opt out of these emails, please let me know. Thank you for your continued interest in the OurMed initiative--we couldn't make this happen without your participation and are grateful for you pitching in! Greg Miller, Executive Director at OurMed.Org

(212) 740-1850 Watch our OurMed YouTube Video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqgYfFxEkLk

Patients, research participants favor disclosure of financial relationships between medicine and industry
May 3, 2010

A review and analysis of previously published studies finds that patients, research participants and journal readers believe financial relationships between medicine and industry should be disclosed, in part because those financial ties may influence research and clinical care, according to a report in the April 26 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

"Financial ties to the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device industries are common in clinical medicine and biomedical research," the authors write as background information in the article. "In clinical care, financial ties affect how physicians prescribe drugs and use devices, and may otherwise influence professional behavior. In research, financial ties have been associated with biased analysis and presentation of data, restrictions on publication and reduced sharing of data. As a result, financial ties have recently received substantial attention from the media and policymakers." Public disclosure of these ties has been recommended or required by medical associations, medical journals, lawmakers, academic medical centers and companies.

Despite this demand for disclosure, little is known about how financial information affects decision-making, the authors note. Adam Licurse, B.A., of Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, Conn., and colleagues systematically reviewed 20 original studies assessing the attitudes of patients, research participants and journal readers toward financial disclosures.

Of these studies, 11 assessed financial ties and perceptions of quality. "In clinical care, patients believed financial ties decreased the quality and increased the cost of care," the authors write. "In research, financial ties affected perceptions of study quality. In two studies, readers' perceptions of journal article quality decreased after disclosure of financial ties."

Eight studies evaluated the acceptability of financial ties. In these studies, patients were more likely to view personal gifts to clinicians as unacceptable than professional gifts. "Patients were concerned that these gifts affect the cost and quality of care and that these gifts influence clinical judgment," the authors write.

In six of 10 studies examining the importance of disclosure, most patients and research participants reported believing financial ties should be disclosed. In the other four, about one-fourth of these populations believed ties should be disclosed. "Although many disclosure recipients want to know about financial ties, fewer believed that disclosure would affect their decision-making," the authors continue. "Most research participants were not concerned about physician financial ties with industry, with as few as 7 percent reporting concern in one study."

"As information on physician and researcher financial ties becomes more publicly available, further research is needed to explore the optimal format for widespread consumer use and the effect on patient decision-making in clinical care and research," they conclude.

SOURCE Archives of Internal Medicine

OurMed's Technology Update
Having completed Milestone1, the OurMed Board has approved the first invoice from Blueliner and we will press on with Mileste2. For Milestone2, we will first focus on building out the homepage and create a solid user account registration page.

According to Arbab Hassan, Blueliner's Project Manager for our project, the articles section of the new OurMed site will be built out using MediaWiki, the design will likely be fluid to mazimize the most real-estate. Stephen Press offered a possible solution to use one of the Joomla plug-ins to switch between full screen and fixed width such as the one on this site.

To look at the work that has been done on Milestone1, go here: 1) Milestone1has been completed.  Vincent Navarro's Assessment, Blueliner's Arbab Hassan's view forward and some of the design comps are listed here.

OurMed's Milestone1 Celebration: Saturday June 4th 12noon 49 West 32nd St (6th Ave)
To celebrate the completion of the Milestone1 work of the OurMed and Blueliner teams on creating an amazing design for the new OurMed site, we will gather at noon on Saturday June 4th on 32nd Street &amp; 5th Avenue, NYC. Tony Wasserman, leading expert on Open Source Technology from Carnegie Mellon's Silicon Valley campus, will be in town for a short stay, and also will be able to join us. We will go Korean at KumGamgSan (bestkimchi.com)located just East of Sixth Avenue in Herald Square: 49 West 32nd Street.

New Facebook technology to affect OurMed!
e O Keynote address that introduces F8 and the Open Graph project: http://apps.facebook.com/feightlive/

The new features will really re-shape how users interact with other site and how they share information. It will also encourage sites to 6incorporate Facebook's new APIs to draw more traffic.

Following is an article from Arman Rasta, CEO of Blueliner. Blueliner is the vendor developing OurMed Phase 2.

Greg, In the last few weeks, there has been a significant and seismic event in social media. Facebook has launched a whole slew of new features that will certainly change the way we interact with websites and how friends and family in our social networks stay connected with our activities online.

To fully understand the impact these features will have for your business, you have to watch the Facebook presentation that unveiled these features and explains why implementing them on your website could be important to your business. You can watch the presentation and read some thoughts from the Blueliner team by clicking on the link below:

www.bluelinerny.com/blog/2010/04/21/facebook-f8-event-recap-from-san-francisco/

I just wanted to bring this to your attention and let you know that Blueliner can implement these features on your site within days, if you should choose to have them available on your site - which I strongly advise you should! Call or email me if you are interested and I can have one of our project managers on it right away.

Best, Arman Rousta

Healthline Raises $14 Million to Grow Medical Search Engine
April 26, 2010 (Source: SearchEnglineWatch.com)

A few weeks ago, I got a chance to speak to Dean Stephens, President &amp; COO of Healthline, about their semantic search engine. Today, Healthline announced that it has raised another $14 million in a third round of financing led by Investor Growth Capital (IGC) and including strategic financing from a joint venture between GE Capital's Media, Communications &amp; Entertainment business and NBC Universal and Reed Elsevier Ventures.

In collaboration with doctors, Healthline have built a semantic search engine that uses professional medical terminology and taxonomies to organize all the data into a consumer friendly package. Their vision is to connect consumers to anything in the health information space that is publicly available.

The idea for a semantic search index came from physicians' observations that despite a noble trend towards consumers trying to educate themselves in healthcare via the internet, many found that 'contextual correctness' was missing. This led consumers to jump to wrong, and often unnecessarily sinister, conclusions. In turn, this led consumers to demand inappropriate medical treatment. Put another way, despite an information revolution, hypochondria and PageRank still don't play nice together.

"Warts-n-all" analysis of how semantic data improves search engine results pages (SERPs) for medical queries According to Healthline, 75% of medical searches start with symptoms. Yet a quick search on Google shows how easy it is for good intentions go awry. A single search for a typical sympton of Warts, namely 'cauliflower skin growth', only takes 3 results before, alarmingly, the Big C Word is mentioned.

BlogWire Launches Beta Of HealthyBlogging.net Community and Services
This article is contributed from Blueliner's Arbab Hassan. It is about BlogWire launching a new blogging site. Notice the features on this new site - they are are features that we plan to have on the OurMed blog sections. This should give you some indication that we are headed in the right direction. May 26, 2010

http://www.healthyblogging.net/

Building content – What to write about?
Changes or additions can be made easily with our WYSIWYG editor (what you see is what you get), making it much easier than Wikipedia and cutting the volume ramp up rate to the new site significantly faster.

At times posting new material may be difficult to give attributions for so it may be easier to publish previously published work Alternatively, you can choose content from one of the many free content ("copy left") sites such as much of the content on:

1. Medpedia.com

2. NIH's PubMedCentral.gov from the National Library of Medicine

3. Wikipedia.org

4. GanFyd.org (original medical wiki site that claims Medpedia copied them and boasts 2000 site visitors per day)

5. PubMed.org

6. Medline

7. Open.Michigan from the University of Michigan

8. WikiChiro.Org

8. Others?

Posting on OurMed.Org
In addition to the Symbiosis Project, OurMed offers writers of original work to publish a vast range of medical topics. Under the three pillar approach of 1) Being Referenced 2) Being Bold and 3) Being Polite, OurMed strives to be a forum through which multiple health and medical issues are presented and debated.

To write, you must have a free OurMed account. You can write about nearly anything, just keep your comments about new ideas,health and medicine.--It's really important that OurMed gets off the ground using a communities collaborative approach to building it, just as Wikipedia did nine years ago.

We are furthering our editorial policies to include a Style Guide. Feel free to suggest ideas to make this a global "go-to" resource for all healthcare needs fit for any patient or healthcare professional.

Please click on this link to make a small post about whatever's on your mind. You can suggest articles, design or features that you'd like to see on the site. http://ourmed.org/index.php/New_Ideas_for_Site

 Most Active Authors in The Past Month: 


 * Savealife * D Joiner * Gmiller * Vnavarro

OurMed's MedTool Project
As we develop OurMed's Phase 2 site, we want to announce a competition to inspire our content contributors to come up with the most useful healthcare diagnostic tools from around the world.

Submissions will eventually be open-sourced and written in Joomla so that it will "plug-in" to our new site as well as be available to all around the world in a copy-left offering. To contribute, a contestant need not be tech savy but only be familiar with common health and medical needs. Will it be a simple Body-Mass calculator, Symptom Disease matcher, Diabetic Insulin calculator--the list may go on and one but we want the most popular, best and easiest to use!

Pioneer Bios
Just like the Wikimedia Foundation that created Wikipedia, OurMed will mostly be driven by volunteers. In addition to the occasional business or technology consultant, the profile for OurMed’s volunteer community will be talented professionals that want to make bring forward the OurMed mission to the end-goal of having a global impact.

To incentivize our founders, we have created the Founding Framer Program. To date, the following folks are eligible and working toward a goal to volunteer more than 100 Communty hours:

Vincente Navarro (OurMed Tech Committee Chair)
212 444 2633 vnavarro@pipeline.com

Research Specialist @ Weill Medical College

Online Database Manager @ Scientists Without Borders

I have done basic science research for over 15 years in the area of prostate cancer. During this time I have had the privilege of working on the development of monoclonal antibodies targeting prostate cancer from concept through clinical trials. This has afforded me a keen insight into development process of therapeutic drugs. In addition, a strong interest in computers has seen me pursue a graduate degree in computer science in addition to my undergraduate in Chemistry. As a result I have designed and developed a clinical trials management system in my laboratory. I am currently the Online Database Manager for Scientists Without Borders. There, I am responsible for the administration of the database and development of the web portal.

Eileen McGinn, MPH (OurMed Content Committee)
MPH/Certificate in Aging, qedeileen@aol.com

Worked in international health and development for 25 years, including several years living in Africa and Asia. Currently PT Research Manager for Nathan Kline Institute, working on the interrelation of poverty and mental health and health equity for persons with disabilities. PT tutor for immigrant high school students at Manhattan Comprehensive Night and Day High School. Volunteer work for many different agencies, including health, disability, immigrant, women's, peace, international. Have written for various websites on health issues. Especially interested in translating technical work into comprehensible language, community-based participatory research and the Capabilities Framework for development and justice.

Geoff Hayden, MD (OurMed Content Committee)
Geoffhayden@gmail.com 615.479.6499 (Cell)

I am a practicing Emergency Physician, splitting time between NYC and South Carolina. I have been in academic practice since 2005 (Residency at Vanderbilt University, Fellowship at University of Pennsylvania), with an emphasis on resident education and emergency ultrasound. My interest in OurMed.org stems from a dissatisfaction regarding the abysmal state of preventive care and a general lack of health care coverage in the U.S. I see OurMed.org as an essential resource to connect patients to health information and health providers.

I imagine my role with OurMed.org in terms of producing content, recruiting other physicians for ongoing contribution, and assisting Greg with the development of a user-friendly, comprehensive clearinghouse of useful health care information.

Geoffrey E. Hayden, MD, FAAEM, FACEP

Adjunct Clinical Professor Vanderbilt University Medical Center Department of Emergency Medicine Nashville, TN Piedmont Medical Center Emergency Department Attending

222 South Herlong Ave Rock Hill, SC 29732

Vanessa Moore (OurMed Recruitment Committee Chair)
MVanellen@ourmed.org 914-665-4534 (home) 914-751-9758 (cell)

Vanessa Moore is a native New Yorker who brings 7 years recruiting experience to the Ourmed recruitment effort. She would like to leverage her experience recruiting volunteers to Ourmed, a forward thinking and progressive approach to disseminating unbiased healthcare information to the public. She has worked in both corporate and nonprofit settings including a consulting engagement for the Department of Education and most recently at the Westchester Independent Living Center, an advocacy group for people with disabilities. She studied Social Sciences at the Lincoln Center campus of Fordham University.

Stephen Press, DC, PhD (OurMed Content Committee Chair)
A practicing Chiropractic physician (33 years). Was chief physician for the "Unified Team" (former USSR) at the XVIth Winter Olympic Games in Albertville, France in 1992. Founded the World Governing body for sports Chiropractic known as "FICS", for Fédération Internationale de Chiropratique du Sport, now headquartered in Lausanne, Switzerland at the Maison Internationale du Sports, and administered in Toronto, at the World Federation of Chropractic offices. I served on the Medical commission of two IOC recognized World Sports Governing bodies; 1st as Chairman for the Fed. Int'l de Roller Sports, and then as Vice-Chairman for FIDE (Chess). Founded the website IAOCO.org, and co-founded WikiChiro.org. Today, I serve as advisor for the International Sports Chiropractic Association, which is the liaison body interacting with the World Olympian's Association. I speak, English, French, Russian and Spanish, play the cello and clarinet, compete in pool, and follow biblical archeology and do artist blacksmithing, making swords and medieval armor as hobbies.

John Volpe (OurMed Tech Committee Content Liaison)
johnvolpe1@yahoo.com 516-221-4692

My background is primarily in accounting, finance and business operations, primarily in the financial services industry. While I'm not a technical professional, I have participated in and managed numerous technical and business projects, primarily involving financial systems. I also worked as a management consultant for a Virginia based company that I did consulting work for the federal and state governments. I am currently retired. In addition to playing tennis and engaging in other physical activities, I volunteer my time and an Account Director with an NYC based organization that provides service grants in the form of a volunteer project team that manages strategy, financial, marketing and development projects for non-profits. My interest in this project is really from the perspective of someone who is a consumer of medical information and is interested in the efficient delivery of medical information to the public.

Richard Knipel, OurMed Content Committee
I have been a volunteer for Wikipedia and other free culture efforts for several years, with a special focus on outreach initiatives to New York area cultural institutions, such as Wikipedia classes at the New York Public Library, museum photography with Wikipedia Loves Art, and urban photography with the TOPP nonprofit with Wikis Take Manhattan. I have served as President of the nonprofit Wikimedia New York City since September 2008. I hope to bring these experiences in helping to build Ourmed into an innovative and rich online healthcare community along the wiki model.

Elise Passikoff, OurMed Tech Committee
Elise Passikoff, OurMed Tech Committee From a background in print and educational publishing, I entered the online world as an editor and technical writer at a start-up software company. There I learned the tools of the trade and gained valuable experience in writing, editing and posting online content. In 2000, I moved to the New York Academy of Sciences [www.nyas.org], where, first as online producer and then as web senior project manager I led the development, implementation, and maintenance of complex online projects, including the ground-breaking website Scientists Without Borders scientistswithoutborders.org].

Diane Joiner, OurMed Content Committee
I have more than 25 years experience in print publishing. I began my career in publishing with Scientific American Magazine; and then transferred to Scientific American Medicine where I was a member of the production department. While at Scientific American Medicine I produced the 2,500 page, two volume, loose-leaf for internal medicine (Scientific American Medicine), as well as the 2,200 page two volume, loose-leaf for surgery (Scientific American Surgery: Practice and Principles). In 2000 I became a member of WebMD’s Professional Publlishing Division. While at WebMD I continued to produce books, pamphlets, and on-line products.

Greg Miller, OurMed Executive Director
at OurMed greg.miller@ourmed.org 212-740-1850

Have 17 years of Corporate Finance and Marketing experience for Fortune 500 companies including nine years abroad (Germany, England and Japan). I've been here in New York since 1996, always passionate about developing new brands, ideas and products. Did Marketing Analysis for ANA, a Japanese Airline, Finance for Cablevision's HD Satellite business and Revlon. Since 2005, I've been inspired by non-profits, created New York's Dance Parade and have worked on OurMed since the Fall of 2008. I'm inspired by the transparent, non-profit approach to the democratization of healthcare. OurMed has a small office at Columbia Medical Center's Audubon Business and Technology Building--Come by and visit us!

3960 Broadway (Entrance on 166th Street) Suite 301 o (212) 740-1850 c (917) 627-7155 greg.miller@ourmed.org

Watch the OurMed Presentation: http://docs.google.com/present/edit?id=0Ad4ohgeyfGzCZGRoNnFuNW1fMzljMmh2OW5jdw&amp;hl=en

Florence Devouard
OurMed Board Member fdevouard@anthere.org

Florence Devouard served as one of the elected representatives to the Wikimedia Foundation Board starting June 2004, and was the Chair of the WMF Board from October 21, 2006 until July 16th, 2008. Florence was born in Versailles (France). She grew up in Grenoble, and has been living since then in several French cities, as well as Antwerpen in Belgium and Tempe in Arizona. She holds two masters, one in Agricultural Sciences (a 5-year degree in agronomical engineering (Diplome d'Ingénieur Grande Ecole) from ENSAIA and the other a postgraduate degree (DEA) in Genetics and Biotechnologies from INPL.She has been working in public research, first in flower plant genetic improvement, and second in microbiology to study the feasability of polluted soil bioremediation. She was employed until 2005 in a French company, to conceive decision-making tools in sustainable agriculture. She is now a consultant in Internet Communication Strategy. She joined the Wikipedia adventure in February 2002 and is known as a contributor under the pseudonym Anthere. Florence is 39, and lives in Clermont Ferrand with her husband Bertrand and her three children, Anne-Gaëlle aged nine, William eleven and Thomas two. On May 16 2008, Florence was made a knight in the French National Order of Merit, proposed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as "chair of an international foundation"

Alex Fotopoulos
OurMed Board Secretary alex@broadwaylawoffices.com

Alex Fotopoulos has served on the board since October 2008. He attended Rutgers College in New Brunswick, NJ and then received his Juris Doctor degree from Southwestern University in Los Angeles, California in 1990. He has experience as a litigation attorney and as an entrepreneur. He has held held positions as an attorney and as part of the management team of such high technology companies including AT&amp;T Wireless, T-mobile, Nextel, Metricom, GTE Internetworking as well as small local start-up ventures. He is a licensed Attorney in New York, New Jersey and California.

Stan Kachnowski
OurMed Board Chair swk16@hitlab.org

Stan Kachnowski is one of America’s distinguished scholars in health-care information policy and management having taught e-health and health-care e-business for nearly 20 years. He has authored over 100 scholarly papers and presentations for the world’s leading journals and societies in health-care technology management, informatics and e-governance. In 2003 he was elected as a Fellow in the Royal Society of Medicine in the United Kingdom for his research with the National Health Service in using handhelds to track patient data. In 1996 he was elected to the US-based College of Healthcare Information Management Executives. Stan is currently a visiting professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, India.

Oleta McHenry
OurMed Board Treasurer Newsgirl_fl@hotmail.com

Oleta McHenry was born in Washington D.C. and grew up in Ohio. After graduating high school, she briefly attended Wright State University in Dayton, studying Political Science. She transferred to St. Petersburg College in St. Petersburg, FL and received her A.A. degree in Liberal Arts. Oleta earned her B.S. in Accounting from Florida Metropolitan University in Clearwater, FL in 2006. Oleta worked for the Pulitzer prize winning newspaper, St. Petersburg Times as a circulation manager. After receiving her degree in accounting, she worked briefly in the insurance industry before joining the Wikimedia Foundation as the fulltime accountant of record. While at the Wikimedia Foundation, Oleta helped put in place accounting practices that would help the company in growth and development. She did not follow Wikimedia to San Francisco and now works for a large medical supply company managing the General Ledger for several regions within the United States. Oleta resides in St. Petersburg, FL and works as an accountant.


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