If you’ve found this blog of mine, great and dandy.
However, I’m exploring Tumblr so have decided to Tumble anything I come across that may be relevant for my work interests. You’ll find it at taneya.tumblr.com. Enjoy!
Steven Johnson’s Ghost Map
When I graduated the past fall, the MPH program gave us all copies of Steven Johnson’s book about the work of John Snow in figuring out the cholera outbreak in London, Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic–and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World. I still haven’t started reading it, but it is definitely on to-do list. Recently, while searching for information about using Prezi.com for presentations, I came across this TED talk by Johnson. The presentation is a few years old, but a good overview of the details of the story.
iPads & Health 2.0
This week @ work I’ve had the opportunity to get acquainted with the iPad. I have to say it is a highly interesting device and I do like it. However, when the day comes for me to purchase something for my personal use, I think I’ll have to hold out for the Google version. :-)
So, I’ve spent the last couple of days furiously reading about the iPad and researching it’s applications for medicine. Imagine, an iPad EMR — there’s a lot of good potential here!
In other news:
- On Monday, I’m off to Denver for the NLM Informatics Training Conference. I am there to represent our research team and present our study which I previously presented on campus back in March.
- This week a Health 2.0 conference was held in DC and I actively followed the Twitter thread — spent way too much time!
MLA 2010
Last month, I made a quick trip to Washington D.C. to present at a symposium for the annual Medical Library Association Annual Meeting. I presented on behalf of our Knowledge Management team at the symposium – E-patients: The Techno Cultural Revolution of Health Consumers.
During the presentation I shared our team’s work integrating health information into our institution’s patient web portal, MyHealthAtVanderbilt. Other presenters discussed their institutional collaborations with personal health records and the most moving part of the day were the talks by e-patients and patient advocates e-Patient Dave & Regina Holliday. Both have experienced our health care system in negative ways and became fully informed patients and advocates for change; their stories are not to be missed and have much to teach us as health information professionals on how we can help create change.
You can view both of their presentations on YouTube:
e-Patient Dave – part 1, part 2, part 3
Regina Holliday – part 1, part 2, part 3
It was a wonderful day overall and I will soon be getting my slides posted to the Symposium Website.
As far as MLA goes, I was only there one day but was truly impressed by the heavy social networking experience. Between the Twitter stream and the MLA Blog, I felt very informed about conference activities even though I was not present the whole time. Way to go MLA! I only wish MORE attendees were tweeting!
M.S.L.S., M.P.H.
I now have new letters behind my name! On Friday, I graduated from Vanderbilt w/ my Masters of Public Health Degree. Whoo hoo!
Not going to post details here but you can read about it on my family blog.
This week I’ll be preparing for the upcoming Medical Library Association Annual Meeting. I’ll be representing the team in an e-patient symposium to discuss our initiatives working with our online patient health portal.
So Close… So Close…
Well, things have been quiet here on my most newly created blog because I have been very busy trying to finish up my program! I’m days away now from finishing — keep your fingers crossed for me.
The past few weeks I’ve been busy working on a site I developed for my MPH practicum project. I still have much work to do, but I’m excited about it because I know it will help me continue my learning about information needs for those involved with area health education center programs. I’ll blog about it later.
What is Medical Informatics?
What is Medical Informatics?
the field that concerns itself with the cognitive, information processing, and communication tasks of medical practice, education and research, including the information science and technology to support these tasks.
Source: Stanford University, R. A. Greenes, and E. H. Shortliffe.Medical Informatics: An Emerging Discipline with Academic and Institutional Perspectives. 1988.
Feeling Nostalgic
Last night I browsed through the news from my alma mater, Emory University, and ran across a magazine article that made me SO nostalgic! In the article Beyond Books, the author profiles the current Matheson Reading Room situated in the Asa G. Candler building on Emory’s quadrangle. The focus of the article is about how students use the space in the library for studying and learning. Picture below: isn’t it gorgeous?
Picture from Flickr user caribbeanfreephoto
The reason I am so nostalgic is because I used to work in this very room, but at that time, it looked nothing like this 
. During all 4 years of college, from 1993-1997, I worked here in the Reserves department of the Emory Library system. My experiences were so great working in the library (this area as well as stints in the Chemistry Library, the main Library, and Government Documents) that after firmly ruling out medical school as an option after nearly failing Organic Chemistry (bleh), information sciences naturally became my next choice.
When I worked there, the reading room as you see here was only as high as about halfway up the beautiful windows. During a 1950′s renovation, the decision was made to split the room with a floor installation mid-way up, reducing the height to about 12 feet for each level. In 1999, which was two years after I graduated, the space was renovated to restore it back to it’s original configuration. I would love to be able to visit the space now and see all the changes. My last visit to the campus was this summer, but I only drove through to show my family — I’ve not seen the inside of the building since just before they started the renovations. I’ll have to make a point to go in next time I’m in the area.
One More Presentation Down!
Been quiet over the past couple weeks as I’ve been busy writing and preparing another presentation. Today, I presented my MPH project to the Department of Biomedical Informatics. Overall I think it went well! This was the second time I’ve presented the project; the first time back in February to the MPH faculty & students.
I am pleased to have completed yet another milestone! Still need to get my act together w/ the regression analysis though
TEDMED Topol Presentation
Over the weekend I watched a few videos from TED and particularly liked this one from Eric Topol. Topol is a cardiologist and geneticist with research interests in mobile health initiatives; he’s also the director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute.
His presentation, The Future of Wireless Medicine, was of immediate interest to me given our class discussion recently on the ways information technology is used in health care (see my previous post). The talk covers various technologies available for monitoring personal health status using wireless capture devices- such as vital signs, fetal signs, sleep patterns, etc. These devices have the capability to project data to your smartphone – imagine a NIKE shoe that uses a sensor in the sole to monitor your physiological data or an iShoe designed to help with falls prevention.
The examples he covers are examples of how we can better capture data in our goal towards truly individualized & personalized medicine. They help bring us one step even closer to using IT to provide a more holistic view of us as patients.
Here are Topol’s list of the Top 10 targets for wireless medicine; each of these health conditions impacts millions.
The talk is interesting and I will be making sure to start tracking more mobile health projects.
