Social Media use for Chronic Pain Management: An Online Survey

Do you have an interest in health-related social media use? If yes, please keep reading…..

Mark Merolli, one of our PhD candidates, has been conducting innovative research aimed at bringing increased rigor to the way in which evidence of improved health outcomes can be achieved using social media in chronic conditions. His literature review on social media use in chronic disease management has recently been published in the Journal of Biomedical Informatics (read here) and he will be presenting some of his work at the Medicine 2.0 Conference, September in London, England.

As part of his PhD research project, he’s developed an online survey to better understand how social media is used to manage chronic pain as a result of various chronic diseases. In particular, individual perceptions regarding ‘how’ different social media influence health outcomes.

He explains the survey in a short video so please watch for further information……Click here

The survey and further information can be found here. It will be open until June 30^th

We would appreciate it if you could make this survey known to your colleagues, members, patients, extended resources, etc. It would be fantastic if you were able to distribute it via your own blogs, websites and social channels. If you do, please contact Mark to let him know you have done so.

Should you have any questions, he is contactable on email – mmerolli@student.unimelb.edu.au or phone:  +61408 513 984

We strongly believe this research fills a pivotal gap in knowledge and hope results in improved evidence-based decision making about social media use for the self-management of a variety of chronic conditions!

Welcome to The University of Melbourne

In January, HBIRU had the pleasure of hosting visiting academic, Professor Riccardo Bellazzi from The University of Pavia, Italy.

Prof Bellazzi is the Director of the “Mario Stefanelli” Bio-Medical Informatics Laboratory and a a Professor of Bioengineering.

A highly regarded and active member of the biomedical informatics community, Prof Bellazzi’s visit was a great opportunity for connecting and collaborating with an international colleague with common research interests.  Dr Douglas Boyle, Head of the GRHANITE™ Health Informatics Unit, at The University of Melbourne’s Rural Health Academic Centre (Shepparton) had this to say about the visit…

HIC 2012: 30th July – 2nd August

This year’s HIC (Health Informatics Conference), HIC2012, was held in Sydney and featured more than 100 presentations over the four-day duration.  As Australia’s largest e-health and health informatics conference, the annual event attracts attendees from all over Australasia and further afield. With the primary theme of Health Informatics – Building a Healthcare Future through Trusted Information, this year’s conference was the most successful yet, attended by more than 900 people and attracting extremely positive feedback.

Genome in a Bottle

Dr Guillermo Lopez-Campos, Biomedical Informatics Researcher at HBIRU, travelled to the US to attend an open meeting of the Genome in a Bottle Consortium. This project, organised by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), aims to establish reference-material, -methods and -data for a selected whole genome. This ‘example’ genome, the accompanying documentation and data will offer a benchmark or standard, against which the validity of other methods can be measured.

HBIRU Education Update

If you have some familiarity with eHealth and Biomedical Informatics concepts & terms, and would like to work in more dept with some of the tools and methods in this field, here’s a subject offering for you!
This subject is particularly suitable for professionals, due to the condensed / intensive format and the timetabling – all classes run from 6pm-9pm on Tuesday and Thursday. First class is 30th October, with last class on 27th November 2012.

The new postgraduate-level elective, INFO90001 eHealth and biomedical informatics tools & methods, is taking enrolments now.
You can download a copy of the flyer here: http://goo.gl/wXvrs

Informatics topics to be covered include (but are not limited to)
Tools and methods for:

• managing clinical data; integrating clinical data with molecular, population, environmental and other data sources;
• translational research, including microarray and next generation DNA sequencing;
• ehealth and broadband-enabled health, shareable medical records, telehealth, mobile health; terminologies, coding and standards;
• computer models to simulate human biology and disease;
• biomedical text mining; social and semantic web for health and life sciences, meta-analysis; systematic reviews;
• managing health and biomedical knowledge;

and an introduction to the ‘next generation’ of health and bioinformatics tools and methods

If you are unsure about your eligibility for this course, or have other queries, please contact the course co-ordinator, Dr Kathleen Gray, via email: kgray@unimelb.edu.au

Current UniMelb students please enrol through regular enrolment channels.

External students please enrol through the Community Access Program http://www.unimelb.edu.au/community/access/application-process.html

The Victorian E-Health Agenda – Calling All Health Informaticians

The elective subject “ISYS90069 E-Health & Biomedical Informatics Systems” coordinated by the Health & Biomedical Informatics Research Unit at The University of Melbourne, has continued to present high calibre and topical lecture presentations. Highly relevant at the moment, is the E-Health agenda.

This week, Mr. Richard Cederberg from the Victorian Department of Health presented on “The Benefits of Electronic Medical Records (EMRs)”, focussing on the Victorian E-Health agenda. Richard was good enough to outline the agenda and has been a great resource as I write this piece.

Health Practice Using the Internet – De-stigmatizing the Fear of the Unknown

I recently had my first experience lecturing as part of the Health and Biomedical Informatics Research Unit. The lecture was part of an elective masters level subject on E-Health and Biomedical Informatics. The cohort consisting of mainly information systems, public health and informatics students/professionals (with other disciplines also represented).

It was refreshing to speak to such a diverse and enthusiastic group. “Health 2.0 – Health Practice Using the Internet” (with a social media focus) was the lecture topic. My own PhD studies are to investigate optimal social media usage in chronic illness management so it was a pleasure to speak on this area to like-minded individuals.

A few things quickly became apparent:
1) There was no way I was going to do this topic justice given the breadth it covers (at best I hoped to give the participants a taste and get their social media fires burning)
2) There are gaps in the theoretical understanding of what social media means, especially to health practice at this level
3) Students possibly need an even more basic understanding of the ‘implications’ of social media to health before discussing specific applications

Augmented reality in education: a trip to AR Camp at the University of Canberra

AR Camp at the University of Canberra’s Inspire Centre

The educational use of augmented reality is becoming a hot topic, with interesting implications not just for classroom learning, but also for knowledge management and public engagement with educational material.

Last week I braved the cold (it was really cold!) to attend a 2-day AR in Education Camp at the University of Canberra, hosted by UoC’s fledgling AR Studio at the new high-tech Inspire Centre. The camp drew a diverse group of attendees, including academic researchers, secondary school teachers and students, and generated a lot of conversation about the current state of AR technology.

The theme that kept coming up was interaction. More specifically, how to move AR experiences beyond the passive model of content consumption that currently dominates, and toward models that leverage the unique interaction affordances of AR. And what exactly are those affordances?

Through lots of hands-on activities and demonstrations, it became clear that AR technology is still quite glitchy – particularly when trying to identify images in shifting light levels or when attempting to geo-locate an augmented object to a high degree of accuracy. The software landscape is also very fragmented still, with AR content scattered across numerous browsers that lack interoperability standards.

Despite these limitations – which are likely to disappear as the technology matures – attendees had plenty of ideas for using AR in education. One secondary school teacher is already using AR in her Chinese language classes. She says the tactile manipulation of the mobile phone (or tablet computer) as an interface device seems to help re-establish neural connections that she believes are disappearing, as her students abandon handwritten study techniques for a more digital approach.

AR Studio is an Australian Learning & Teaching Council (ALTC) funded project, developed by a research team from the University of Canberra, the Australian National University (ANU) and Macquarie University. More about the studio.

Clinical eHealth Capability workshops

Action shot from the project workshop in Perth

Co-ordinated Interprofessional Curriculum Renewal for eHealth Capability in Clinical Health Professional Degrees

As part of the Office of Learning and Teaching (OLT) project on curriculum renewal to include ehealth capabilities in clinical health profession degrees, 4 national workshops were run in February 2012 in Brisbane, Sydney, Perth and Melbourne.

These workshops were a great success, bringing together coordinators and directors of a wide range of entry level health profession degrees from across Australia, such as medicine, pharmacology, physiotherapy, nursing, radiography, dentistry, social work, psychology, speech pathology and genetic counselling (to mention just a few of the fields represented).

With a number of expert panellists from academia, government and industry, and participants from a variety of disciplines, the workshops provided a forum for robust discussions around the next steps to building ehealth capability for future clinical health professionals. The breadth of participant familiarity with eHealth concepts was also fairly varied, meaning there were elements of interprofessional education for participants themselves.

The National EHealth Transition Authority (NEHTA) also complemented the workshops by presenting a session on the Personally Controlled Electronic Health Records (PCEHR).

The project website http://clinicalinformaticseducation.pbworks.com contains more information on the project and its activities.

A leap into eHealth event

On 29th February, the Victorian branch of HISA (Health Informatics Society of Australia) held their first networking and professional education event for 2012, ‘A leap into e-health’.

With a number of highly respected local speakers, the event was headlined by an international guest,

Dr Greg Marchand, Director of Informatics, Department of Emergency Medicine at Washington Hospital Center in Washington D.C.
Dr Marchand gave a presentation about improving outcomes by the use of real-time patient data in Accident & Emergency / ER.

HBIR’s Prof Fernando Martin-Sanchez presented on bioinformatics, leading to a rush of questions from the floor, primarily on the human genome project. His presentation is available to view on the HBIR Slideshare account.

A/Prof Rodrigo Marino from Melbourne Dental School outlined some of the promising projects in teledentistry;

Other presentations on clinical informatics were given by Jenny O’Brien (Chief Clinical Information Officer at Epworth Hospital) and Dr Ethan Gershon (Executive Director Information Development at Alfred Health).