Internet News

Demise of Google Health

Google Health: First Failure of 2012, Robert L Mitchell, Computerworld / PCWorld (Nov 25)

Google Health, long ago, was a search vertical, then it became a "personal health record data aggregation service for consumers". While people may trust their email messages to Google's servers, they didn't do so with their personal health information - or maybe it was the ads that put them off.

"Google anonymized users' personal health data for purposes of data mining, and famously provided trending information on influenza outbreaks. But it also used the data as a mechanism to sell targeted advertising. And while advertisers didn't know who was getting their messages, the idea of receiving highly targeted ads for specific health conditions cited in users' personal health records struck many as creepy. "

Medify for medical research

Medify: For when you need to become a medicine geek, Rafe Needleman, Webware (Sep 27)

Medify is a new medical information site that searches medical research studies. You're encouraged to create an account in order to keep notes and share with the "community". University crests adorn the top of the page - including the University of Toronto.

"Medify analyzes free-form text from abstracts of articles in medical journals, and lets you filter them by patient type (gender or age, for example). Charts show you which studies are most relevant for your group, and also which are newest. The graphical language of Medify's charts is unique, but quickly learned. (See also Apixio, another startup that analyzes medical study data, but for medical professionals.)"Read more:

Google Health Closing

Google Shuts Down Health, Energy Services By Nancy Gohring, IDG News via PCWorld (Jun 24)

Two Google services did not work out - Google Health for collecting personal health information, and Google PowerMeter for monitoring electricity use. Both were available in the US.

"Google Health was designed to let people create and access a central repository for all of their health care information. It launched a beta of the service in mid-2008, about six months after Microsoft unveiled a similar offering called HealthVault. Skeptics wondered at the time if Google could secure the many partnerships it needed to make the project work, and whether users would entrust it with sensitive health data."

Health News Updates

Top 10 RSS Feeds For Medical News & Alerts, Saikat Basu, MakeUseOf (May 18)

You may need to track new discoveries about a medical condition. This article lists 10 services that produce RSS feeds you can easily monitor through a RSS reader (such as Google Reader).

Notable ones include Medicine Net, Medline Plus, Yahoo Health - worth reviewing all 10.

Resource on Alternative Medicine

NIH Launches New Resource on Complementary and Alternative Medicine, Newsbreaks (APr 28)

"The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) of the National Institutes of Health has unveiled a new online resource, designed to give healthcare providers easy access to evidence-based information on complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). This new resource seeks to provide health care providers with the tools necessary to learn about the various CAM practices and products and be better able to discuss the safety and effectiveness of complementary and alternative medicine with their patients."

Drug Search in Canada

Canada lacks oversight on online medical information, study finds by CAROLINE ALPHONSO, Globe and Mail (Feb 23)

Ah - someone has noticed that Canadians are poorly served in obtaining higher quality information about drugs and medical treatments. Mostly web searchers have to turn to large US resources such as the Medline Plus or Mayo Clinic.

This study reports that - "Wikipedia entries or pharmaceutical company websites are almost always the top hits when Canadians Google the name of a brand or generic drug, while in the United States, Web surfers are directed to a profile of the drug from the government-run National Library of Medicine’s website."

The study was done by Michael Law, an assistant professor at the Centre for Health Services and Policy Research at the University of British Columbia.

"Prof. Law and his colleagues conducted searches of nearly 300 drugs, and their results, published online this week in the Annals of Pharmacotherapy, showed that Wikipedia turns up as the first search result about 85 per cent of the time when looking up the generic name of a drug. Industry websites crop up nearly 80 per cent of the time when searching the brand name.

Compare this to the U.S., where about three-quarters of the time Google searches yielded a drug synopsis from the NLM, which is a branch of the National Institutes of Health, the country’s medical research agency."

We should pause for a moment before we slam Wikipedia - it is often a good starting point. But there would be merit to have a drug or health / medical search site first. Also, this shouldn't be seens as a criticism of Google's ranking algorithms. The issue is that Canada does not have well funded consumer health sites with comprehensive, authoritative information.

The article says that the federal Ministry of Health is looking into it. This is the same ministry that couldn't find money to support the Canadian Health Network , and today gives us the government-brochure Health Canada site.

One commenter noted, "Savvy medical information searchers just go directly to FDA, Worst Pills Best Pills, the Cochrane Library, and the Therapeutics Initiative. Try it. "

Afraid so - this is really a matter of educating web searchers on how to find and use speciality sites. Check first with your local library.

Mayo Clinic vs WebMD - integrity vs pseudo medicine

A Prescription for Fear, by Virginia Heffernan, New York Times (Feb 4)

Mayo Clinic Health Information is "No hysteria. No drug peddling. Good medicine. Good ideas. " WebMD is a “hypochondria time suck.”

Strong and fighting words. There is much more.

"Mayo Clinic has every motivation to keep its information authoritative and up to date. " "Contrast this with WebMD, which — with every reason to amp up page views, impress advertisers and drive traffic to commercial sites — has the junky, attic-y look of your standard ad-chocked Web site. "

[Thanks to Tony for sending in the story.]

Using Internet for Health Topics

Health Topics, Pew Internet (Feb 1)

Who hasn't looked into a health concern on the Internet? Pew Internet Project found in a survey in the US that 20% of Internet users DON'T look online for health information.

But the 80% who do make health search third in the uses people have for the Internet after email and using a search engine.

The report points to demographics for understanding varying rates of use and the make up of the "most vulnerable populations"

"However, the survey finds that not only are some demographic groups more likely than others to have internet access, but these same groups are generally more likely to seek health information once online. The most likely groups to look online for health information include: caregivers, women, whites, younger adults, and adults with at least some college education. The groups least likely to look online for health information include: African Americans, Latinos, people living with disability, older adults, and adults with a high school education or less."

Specific uses include:

* 29% of internet users look online for information about food safety or recalls.
* 24% - drug safety or recalls.
* 19% - pregnancy and childbirth.
* 17% - memory loss, dementia, or Alzheimer’s.
* 16% - medical test results.
* 14% - how to manage chronic pain.
* 12% - long-term care for an elderly or disabled person.
* 7% - end-of-life decisions.

SunnyBrook gives patients access to e-records.

Medical records at the click of a mouse. Toronto Star (Jan 23)

Patients at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre can manage their health and access records over the Internet.

"MyChart, Sunnybrook's innovative electronic health access service, lets patients check laboratory results, review their prescriptions, see ultrasound images and connect with their physicians. "

The Ontario Ministry of Health should hire the developers and make this standard in Ontario.

Google Health still trying

Google tweaks Google Health dashboards, Tom Krazit, Relevant Results (Sept 15)

Google Health still exists - Google's effort in the US to be your personal health aid and record keeper.

"Google Health is a service that allows users to upload personal health information to track their health status over time and find information on health issues, doctors, and other medical needs. Google has decided to make it easier for users to access their data through an improved dashboard that also lets users set personal health goals for themselves."

Which part of concern about privacy does Google does not understand?

Drug Search at Wolfram Alpha

Ask Wolfram|Alpha about Medical Drug Treatments, Wolfram Alpha (July 15)

Wolfram Alpha has developed a disease database that also has data on drug treatments.

"Wolfram|Alpha ranks the drug classes by the number of patients to whom they were administered. For example, “hypertension drug treatment”, initially shows us that, of all the patients diagnosed with hypertension, 25% were prescribed angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitors, ..."

And more.

Canadian-Virtual-Health-Library

CHLA and CIHR to Develop First Canadian Virtual Health Library, Newsbreaks (July 12)

"The National Research Council's Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (NRC-CISTI) has announced that the Canadian Health Libraries Association (CHLA) and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) are moving forward with the development of the Canadian Virtual Health Library (CVHL)-a first for Canada."

http://www.cihr-irsc.gc.ca/

Hmm - first photo is of Prime Minister Harper announcing a postdoctoral scholarship. Hope this is not another Conservative promotional site. Otherwise promising for researchers.

Health Sites Use Semantic Technologies

Health Sites Use Semantic Technologies to Provide Better Result, Paula Hane, Newsbreaks (Jul 1)

Health verticals do have better tools for search health questions - especially developed taxonomies and semantic technologies for discerning the information need.

"Searching for health information continues to be one of the most dominant areas of web search activity. Over the years, we've seen the development of better search capabilities in a newer generation of search engines that draw on semantic technologies (the meaning of language) to provide concept-based searching, in contrast to full-text search. Behind the scenes, the search engines draw on taxonomies and databases of medical concepts that include diseases, conditions, causes, symptoms, diagnoses, treatments, and other medically relevant attributes."

Mentions several: Healthline, Yahoo Health, HealthMash, Everyday Health, Medstory, RightHealth.

There is a problem, however, with consumer health sites - too many ads - definitely the case at Healthline and Right Health (from Kosmix). Medstory is different - interesting for technology - but not very fresh - stuck in beta since 2008.

Reminder: Use a health vertical

Consulting 'Dr. Google': Study finds much Internet-based sports medicine information is incorrect or incomplete, Physorg.com (Jul 2)

The results you get from a search on a health matter from Google or other general web search engine may not (will not) be the best. A study published in the July 2010 issue of the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery (JBJS) found that about 20 percent of the sites in the top ten results were "sponsored" sites. It's not clear from the article whether these were actual ads (which can confuse the user), or commercial sites that are highly optimized on those search terms. Regardless, the ranking for "authority", in spite of claims search engines to the contrary, is poor.

"In terms of content, Dr. Karunakar says, nonprofit sites scored the highest, then academic sites (including medical journal sites), and then certain non-sales-oriented commercial sites (such as WebMD and eMedicine). The least accurate information sources were newspaper articles and personal web sites. Commercial sites with a financial interest in the diagnosis, such as those sponsored by companies selling a drug or treatment device, were very common but frequently incomplete."

What should the searcher do? Use a health vertical. Some are mentioned by the study's authors:"WebMD and eMedicine, and look for the seal of compliance for transparency and accountability from the Health On the Net Foundation (HON). "

This was a study by orthapaedic surgeons. "The AAOS recommends Your Orthopaedic Connection, or orthoinfo.org, as a resource for patient education information, or if specific to sports medicine, the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine (AOSSM)."

Also see - Doctors Warn Against Relying Too Much On Google, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Jul 5)

Health Data at Wolfram Alpha

Disease and Patient-Level Statistics with Wolfram|Alpha, Wolfram Alpha (Jun 29)

Get data on health conditions from Wolfram Alpha.

"Wolfram|Alpha has now assimilated data from two different surveys conducted by the CDC: the national ambulatory medical care survey (NAMCS) and its hospital-focused counterpart, the national hospital ambulatory medical care survey (NHAMCS). Together, these surveys provide information on common reasons why people visit the doctor’s office, drug treatments that are highly correlated with a particular disease, and which diseases are most commonly diagnosed within specific races, ethnicities, and genders."

Google Search for medications

Google Adds New Health-Search Feature For Medications by Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (Jun 21)

"When users search on a prescription or generic drug (e.g., “Lipitor” or “acetaminophen”) a summary and description will appear at the top of search results. The summary links to National Institutes of Health (NIH) content and more specific information such as “side effects.” The new feature was developed in partnership with the NIH."

Only in the United States for now. Using google.com from Canada doesn't get around it.

ResearchRaven helps medical researchers

ResearchRaven - new service based in Oregon, US, "to advance health research, program development and scholarship by enabling users to efficiently find current information about funding opportunities, professional conferences, calls for papers and other research-related materials."

Hope Leman, Research Information Technologist at Samaritan Health Services, contributes a lexicon of terms. For example, this one on crowdsourcing:

"Crowdsourcing in science is basically a call (usually in an online venue such as via a blog posting or a comment in a social networking site like FriendFeed or on a wiki or some such medium) for input by a scientist or team of scientists about an ongoing project, a single experiment, the construction/compilation of a resource (the free online chemical structures database ChemSpider is a notable example) or other research-related matters."

Mentioned in Crowdsourcing – brilliant move or stupid mistake? , The Next Web (Apr 6)

A Dream Search Engine for Science

Not So Wild a Dream: The Science 2.0 Federated Search Dream Machine, The Next Web ( March 11)

Hope Leman, research information technologist for Samaritan Health Services in Oregon who writes often about health search engines, identifies the qualities that the perfect federated health search engine would have.

It has it all - PUbMed, open access journals and pre-print, funding information, update tools and online collaborative tools. Along the way she mentions that worldwidescience.org is underused.

A fine piece.

Health Info at Bing

Bing Updates Its Health Search, Research Buzz (Jan 15)

Bing now displays an information box at the top of the page on health related searches. You'll see it on diabetes or "high blood pressure" - must use quotation marks.

Tara Calishain critiqued her results and found them less than stellar.

GoPubMed - another way to search PubMed

GoPubMed turns a dull search engine into a brainiac. Altsearchengines (Dec 22)

PUbMed as a medical bibliographic index used to be intimidating. Now we have the Go version that was developed by Transinsight in Germany. GoPubMed is a new interface that presents a faceted view.

"The free public web site, a semantic browser for the life sciences community, demonstrates what a semantic browser is all about. It is based on the standard database PubMed, provided by the US National Library of Medicine. PubMed is widely used among biomedical researchers. But it is far from perfect: “PubMed returns some 50,000 articles if you enter ‘heart diseases’. In reality, though, there are more than 800,000 articles on this topic. Most of them do not use ‘heart diseases’ as a key word, so the standard PubMed search engine won’t find them,” Alvers explains."

Helps to know the MESH categories to use this. The search is still somewhat intimidating. Meant for health professionals.

Wolfram Alpha for medical test data

Wolfram|Alpha Medical Test Data, WA Blog (Dec 8)

Wolfram|Alpha helps you see your medical test data charted against US population. Example given is for cholesterol

The new BioMedSearch

Biomedical search engine BioMedSearch, Altsearchengines (Nov 24)

"BioMedSearch is an enhanced version of the NIH PubMed search that combines MedLine/PubMed data with data from other sources to make the most comprehensive biomedical literature search available. BioMedSearch also provides advanced account features that allow saved searches, alerts, saving documents to portfolios, commenting on documents and portfolios, and sharing documents with other registered users. Registering for BioMedSearch is free."

Has a very good advanced search. Also, has created topical groupings from analysis of the text which can make browsing easier.

Semantic Search Quertle

Quertle - relationship driven biomedical search - looks for facts in documents and builds relationships in order to answer queries. Search results are from MEDLINE/PubMed and BioMed Central. Quertle also shows filters.

Semantic search engine Quertle, Altsearchengines (Nov 21)

Google Flu Trends

Google Flu Trends shows flu activity around the world based on search terms.

"We have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for "flu" is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries are added together. We compared our query counts with traditional flu surveillance systems and found that many search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening. By counting how often we see these search queries, we can estimate how much flu is circulating in different countries and regions around the world."

In Canada, right now, it is intense. Google has data on all provinces except PEI and Quebec - and there is none from the territories.

For people in the United States, Google.org also has a flu-shot locator service.

Google Flu Shot Locator Shows Where To Get Vaccines Near You!, Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (Nov 10)

Globe Life H1N1

Useful Web sites, Twitter links and blog posts , Globe and Mail (Updated Oct 27)

Globe Life has a short list of resources for information about swine flu. This includes web sites, three twitter names, a blog, related articles (1), and fact sheets (1). The Twitter links from three jounralists indicate how far Twitter has come as a current awareness / research tool.

Allplus comes to NIH

This is exciting news - the National Institute of Health (NIH) Library in the US is using WebLib's search technology for federated search across collections and clustering through semantic analysis, and its HealthMash Medical Knowledge Base.

In beta, the NIH AllPlus Search Demo is at http://nihlibrarysearch.nih.gov/search/

You can

+ select sources: PubMed, NIH Library, or MedLine Plus.
+ search by keyword, title or author
+ explore related concepts on the search results page (assisted by the HealthMash Knowledge Base).
+ view results by topics (derived from analyzing the results)
+ view topics graphically - interactive map
+ view results by source
+ sort by relevance or by date

On the right is a panel of images - taken from Google images.

Counts of results from other sources are shown in a column. These include OCLC Worldcat, a number of NLM databases, and the general search engines - Ask, Google, Yahoo - (What, no Bing?) This will help searchers branch out but those links mean leaving the AllPlus sphere.

Endre Jofoldi of WebLib explained in a comment on the Altsearchengines post that, "it [the NIH Allplus demo] is based on our PolyMeta search anc clustering engine and uses our new HealthMash health knowledge base as well for the explore and discover section."

Compare the AllPlus demo to the NIH standard search, which uses a Google Search Appliance. Try it on cholesterol: compare results from the NIH Google powered search to those from the NIH AllPlus Search Demo.

The AllPlus version presents a dashboard of controls - it is information rich - from that panel the searcher learns about the topic and can start to refine. But the Google version is plain - there is nothing to help the searcher make sense of what is on the page.

References:

NIH Library launches Beta Search Engine for Open House, Altsearchengines (Oct 30)

NIH Library Begins Beta Test of Metasearch Tool, ResourceShelf (Oct 30)

Tracking H1N1

Your resource for tracking the swine flu by Don Reisinger, Webware (Oct 8)

Three resources for tracking the spread of H1N1

+ FluTracker
+ GeoCommons Swine Flu Tracker
+ Centers for Disease Control
* HealthMap
+ H1N1 Response Center
+ Swine Flu Tracker
+ World Health Organization

HealthMash - vertical search

HealthMash is a (somewhat) new federated web search engine for medical and health materials that uses the semantic search technologies of WebLib.

From the About page:

"Our mission is to promote health and well being in the world by providing personally relevant information from trusted health sites on the Web. HealthMash™ is powered by the world's most sophisticated Health Knowledge Base that captures the expertise of medical professionals and people everywhere practicing the art of living and healing and the Wisdom of the Ages."

A broad search at HealthMash nicely shows methods for exploring related concepts, tests and treatments, and health concerns. The federated search across the health sites organizes results by topic (semantically determined), and shows boxes of different resource types - articles, books, images, news, video etc. As well, there are controls to limit the search to any of those sources. All of this creates a dashboard of tools for the searcher to explore and refine line of inquiry. I find it easy to use, and on my queries, the sources were "trusted".

Altsearchengines' medical librarian Hope Leman interviewed the CEO - Hope interviews HealthMash CEO Endre Jofoldi (Jan 23, 2009)

The interview reveals that HealthMash uses Pubmed/Medline and MayoClinic among others, and identifies the Health Knowledge Base as the distinguishing feature and advantage of HealthMash.

HealthMash was developed by WebLib, the same company who created the federated search engines, AllPlus and PolyMeta, both of which are very useful for general web searching.

Review of healthBase

NetBase Launches Free Semantic Search Demo Site: healthBase
by Barbara Quint, Newsbreaks (Sept 17)

This is an in-depth report on the Health Base service that showcases semantic searching technology from NetBase Solutions.

"The healthBase (http://healthbase.netbase.com) service that launched earlier this month is open to all users, providing structured searches built around four tabs covering treatments of conditions, causes of conditions, complications of conditions, and pros and cons of treatments. The service taps into masses of documents from a limited number of sources, extracting relevant sentences and sorting them into categories for display. That's the good news. The unfortunate news is that some observers have approached healthBase as a full-service health information source and found it wanting-not unexpected if one considers its primary purpose is demonstrating technology."

Bottom line seems to be that this is something to try - it may do a good job on the topic, and to watch - because there are continuous improvements underway.

PubMed Redesign

Redesigned PubMed Goes Live & Getting to Know Rapid Research Notes, ResourceShelf (Oct 1)

PubMed redesign is at http://preview.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed

From the NLM Overview

"The PubMed homepage has been streamlined, requiring less effort to find resources. The new homepage includes an NCBI Header, Search Bar, and Footer that are common to all PubMed pages."

MSN - My Health Info

MSN Introduces Online Tools to Help People Make Smarter Health and Lifestyle Decisions, WebWire (Oct 1)

"REDMOND, Wash. — Today, MSN released the beta of My Health Info, a new online service that helps people manage their health information on the Web. My Health Info is a unique service that offers people a variety of tools and widgets to upload, organize and monitor health information stored in their personal Microsoft HealthVault accounts. The new service allows people to research medical concerns, read the latest health news, gain guidance from medical experts, learn about nutrition, and monitor conditions such as high blood pressure or diabetes."

MSN has a health center at http://health.msn.com/

BioMed Image Search

Search over 1 million images with BioMed Search, Altsearchengines (Sep 22)

BioMed Search searches images from biomedical articles - also figures and schema.

"Over 1 Million images have been indexed and more is on its way. BioMed Seach indexes image captions along with the citations to these images. BioMed Search has been created by Alex Ksikes. Alex Ksikes is currently a Ph.D. student at the University of Cambridge.""

Supports some syntax in the query,

HealthBase with Content Intelligence

HealthBase--medical search engines maturing by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore, CNet (Sept 2)

HealthBase uses a "content intelligence platform" as semantic technology to understand health content.

"Culling through 10 million health articles and sorting search results on two types of data, "conditions" and "treatments," into manageable subsets, HealthBase includes "causes of," "treatments for," "complications of," and "pros and cons of treatment." Content sources are also provided and ranked. And Jens Tellefsen vice president of marketing and product strategy, said it might include user collaboration akin to Digg's voting articles up or down in the near future."

For more about Content Intelligence see Is Content Intelligence the New Business Intelligence?

"Content intelligence is about creating new content and information services derived from a company’s own premium content, and then optionally combining and enriching it with insights from the Internet, resulting in new sets of content that can power new and differentiated information services. But how is this achieved? By using semantic technologies to mine the breadth and depth of relevant, targeted information from the Web, or proprietary or enterprise sources."

Postscript

Comments from Gary Price - Netbase Debuts HealthBase Demo (Sept 2)

Google Health Results

Google Answers Your Health Questions With Health OneBox by Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Aug 27)

Good - Google has enhanced Web search to show Google Health results on medical related queries at the top of the page - as an enriched search result.

For diabetes you'll see links to Google Health and three major health sites (Mayo, Medline, WebMD).

Google Health is better too for topics it covers. It has an overview, breakdown of the topic (symptoms, treatment, prognosis etc), illustrations and news. However, it is not searchable on its own. Google really wants people to use this as a place for organizing personal information and sharing with family and doctors.

NIH and Wikimedia

NIH and Wikimedia Foundation Collaborate to Improve Online Health Information, ResourceShelf (July 15)

This is an endorsement of the highest kind.

Quoted - "The National Institutes of Health and the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that operates the Wikipedia online encyclopedia, are joining forces to make health and science information more accessible and reliable. This collaboration is the first of its kind for both organizations."

Bing for Health

A recent entry in the Bing Community blog highlighted the health search features of Bing. In fact the display of search results on medical conditions and health related questions is quite good in its selection and groupings - better, I submit, than at other large search engines.

Searching for Health Information, Alain Rappaport, Bing Community blog (July 7)

Bing has been designed to respond to words that indicate health questions. On these it claims to select the better ("trusted") sources. Its goal "is to provide authoritative and educational content to consumers related to their search".

Results are grouped into categories called quick tabs. "For health queries, the Quick Tabs are determined by combining both common searches and medical knowledge – so the categories are defined both by what interests people the most and what is medically relevant to the subject matter." Some tabs provide "instant answers" determined from mining documents and "infering" answers.

Thus, on a search for atrial fibrillation , there will be results from MayoClinic, MedlinePlus, American Heart and other notable health sources. These search results also had Wikipedia - some would challenge this choice, but it did have a very long and informative article.

The Quick Tabs identify groupings for Articles - full articles from MayoClinic and others, Symptoms, Management, Medication, Images. These help the searcher consider aspects of the topic.

The related searches might provide some leads as well based on Bing's record of similar searches.

The pullouts of selected information, quick tabs, and Bing's restriction to its "library" of health resources combine into a fairly competitive package.

How does this compare to other large search engines?

Google can only propose some related searches and, although the top results come from similar sources to Bing's, Google veers off into non-medical.

Hakia, which claims credible sources for health questions, seems to have a limited collection of Mayo Clinic and Consumer Reports for our search on atrial fibrillation.

Ask, also claiming to have semantic understanding, has a nugget of information from Healthline and some suggestions in Related Searches but also a crowd of sponsored results and some mysteriously placed spam about a domain name.

Yahoo does better with a small capsule from its Health portal but still doesn't come close to the Bing presentation.

Conclusion: For that first sweep through the Web on a health question, Bing would be a good place to start - and then, depending on need, move to health verticals.

Health Matters to XRay Technicians

Go Beyond Google: 50 Excellent Health Search Engines, X Ray Technicians Schools (undated)

Good list of 50, categorized and annotated.

Site has other articles such as this on on The 100 Most Unhealthy Foods in the American Diet - some surprising entries.

Biomedical Databases

Beyond PubMed. Other free-access biomedical databases

Giglia, E. Beyond PubMed. Other free-access biomedical databases. Europa Medicophyisica, 2007, vol. 43, n. 4, pp. 563-569. [Journal Article (Print/Paginated)]

Abstract: "This article presents several popular free-access biomedical databases (general, genetic, pharmacological, evidence-based oriented, or dealing with health technology assessment) from which researchers can select the best tool for the purpose and context of a specific research. Some gateways for searching across multiple databases that provide a "one-stop shopping" point of access are also presented."

Available as an ePrint.

Social Net for Health Information

The Social Life of Health Information, by Susannah Fox, Sydney Jones. PEW Internet (June 11)

Americans certainly use the web for researching health matters (61%) and 60% of those have accessed some form of user-generated health information - blog, reviews, podcasts.

"This Pew Internet/California HealthCare Foundation survey finds that technology is not an end, but a means to accelerate the pace of discovery, widen social networks, and sharpen the questions someone might ask when they do get to talk to a health professional. Technology can help to enable the human connection in health care and the internet is turning up the information network’s volume."

Some key findings:

+ 61% of adults look online for health information.
+ 60% of e-patients (37% of adults) have accessed or created user-generated health information online.
+ 41% have read someone else's commentary or experience about health or medical issues on an online news group, website, or blog.
+ 22% of e-patient social networking site users have followed their friends' personal health experiences or updates on the site.
+ 12% of e-patient Twitterers have posted comments, queries, or information about health or medical matters.

Therefore, while there is interest in reading accounts by others, there is reluctance to write about one's own.

CABI on Swine Flu

Pandemic or Panic? CABI Finds the Facts for Free on Swine Flu, aka H1N1 by Barbara Quint, Newsbreaks (May 7)

This is a nice illustration of the value of turning to the specialist aggregators: CAB International (CABI; www.cabi.org) has made its database of global health data free for the duration of the swine flu crisis.

"Even more exciting, it has initiated a handsome mashup called the CABI Swine Flu Dashboard (www.netvibes.com/cabialerts), a mélange of key sources, facts, search strategies, topical maps, and other content selected by its expert content editors. "

Tracking Swine Flu

Online resources for tracking swine flu, By Don Reisinger, Webware (Apr 27)

There are many health sites mentioned in this article about tracking swine flu.

"The spread of a new swine flu is quickly becoming a worldwide concern. The Web, of course, is an ideal resource for learning more about it, but there is plenty of misinformation as well. Here are the sites we recommend turning to. "

New Healthline Search Tools

Healthline Adds New Doctor, Treatment Search Tools To Site, by Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (Apr 21)

Consumers have many excellent sites to turn to now for health information. Healthline is one of them.

"And while the health vertical online is quite competitive, many of the names in the segment are not well known to consumers because of the occasional nature of “health search.” One of the most sophisticated and powerful is Healthline, which offers “semantic health search” built on an elaborate taxonomy of diseases and symptoms."

It has just added treatment search and doctor search. This will be for people in the United States.

"TreatmentSearch also offers the ability to estimate costs for the intended procedure by local market. In addition, it provides a range of alternative treatments and therapies to surgical procedures in many cases. Indeed, there’s a dizzying amount of available information on the site."

Presentations on Search at CIL Conference

Some presentations from the Computers in Library 2009 Conference are available.

Under Information Discovery & Search

+ A Super Searcher Shares 25 Search Tips/Thoughts by Mary Ellen Bates

+ Searching Google Earth by Ran Hock

+ Searching Conversations: Twitter, Facebook, & the Social Web - by Greg Notess [Not available yet[

+ Information Discovery: Science & Health by Walter Warmick - entering the deep web by using federated search of scientific databases. [Available at site]

+ Seeking Health by Tamas Doszkocs - lists several health search engines and identifies some with semantic search capabilities (medstory, healthline, goopubmed) [Available at site]

Conference also had a track on Search and Search Engines - federated search, mobile search, RSS, emerging search technologies.

Semantic GoPubMed

Go3R - search technology from Germany that sorts results into facets. Information page must be striking a humourous pose with its opening paragraph -

"The project aims at developing a knowledge-based search engine for alternative methods to animal experiments in order to provide optimal search options for alternatives to animal experimentation. The first step consists of developing an ontology for the knowledge domain of alternative methods to animal experiments. Such an ontology represents a system of knowledge which permits logical deductions as a result of the numerous relationships between terms describing alternative methods it contains - in rough analogy to the possible connections between synapses in the brain."

Putting aside the 'animal experiments', you can experiment with pubmed searches at GoPubMed.

Google Health Sharing

Google Health lets users share their online records by Steven Musil, Webware (March 4)

"Google Health has introduced a new feature that lets people share their online health records with designated doctors, friends, and family members. "

Getting Medical Information

Find answers to your medical questions with these five sites by Don Reisinger, Webware (Feb 18)

Don Reisinger speaks from experience. Here are five strong recommendations for medical and health sites.

Tom Flemming's Health Collection

Users of the Health Care Information Resources web site that used to be on the Health Sciences Library server at McMaster University will be pleased to learn that the creator, (Tom Flemming, has moved the collection to delicious at
http://delicious.com/tomflem

Tom. now retired, began this collection when he was Head of Public Services in the HSL at McMaster to support the work he and his staff did to help academics and patients.

In a posting to the Toronto SLA group Tom wrote,

"My new del.icio.us collection now has over 8,100 links to important and useful health care internet sites. The extensive network of links to alternative and complementary health care from the old site is once again accessible on del.icio.us. There are links to practically every topic in health and health care that librarians and their clients will want to explore, including: disease, healthy living, nutrition, substance abuse, nursing, surgery, bariatric medicine, aromatherapy, endometrial cancer, lesbian wellness, naturopathy, smoking cessation and many, many more.

There are over 1,600 tags (subject headings) in use on the site to assist you in locating useful web links in the collection. Tag bundles help you bring together single topics which are scattered through a number of subject headings (such as "Cancer" which may be indexed with more specific tags such as: "lymphoma", "bladder cancer", "chordoma", "gynecologic cancer", and so on). When you pull together a set of links on any topic, you will note that the set can be further refined by choosing from the list of tags on the right which have been used, in addition, to index only those links you have already chosen.

There are many nice features and specific advantages available to searchers using del.icio.us. There are also problems specific to this particular implementation of social bookmarking. You will find a real need for patience in creating sets in my collection on del.icio.us; when you are dealing with as many as 8,100 indexed links, creating subsets specific to your own query takes more time than one would like. Response time on del.icio.us is not optimal."

This really must have been a mammoth undertaking. It will take people new to delicious some time to adjust to using it. In doing so, keep in mind three options

1) Use the tag bundles to browse. This is the subject directory.
2) Search by keyword, identify a result that matches your interest, and then follow the tags on it to find others on that topic
3) Search by tag if you know what you want.

There is a RSS feed available for Tom's collection so that you can be notified of new sites that Tom adds. Click on the RSS Feed at the bottom of the page and add it to your RSS reader.

If you have your own delicious account, you might also add tomflem to your network to keep track of the latest bookmarks.

There is wonderful potential in this collection especially if this expands into a network of health librarians sharing bookmarks and their evaluations of the resources.

Mednar for health search

Deep Web Technologies’ Mednar Is Rated the #1 Alternative Health Search Engine, eReleases (Jan 21)

Altsearchengines named Mednar the best health information search engine.

"“Mednar offers access to an array of databases that are simply not mined by other health search engines and features a dependable email alert service that enables users to keep up on the latest publications on the medical topics of their choice,” said AltSearchEngines reviewer Hope Leman. “Mednar is the Secretariat and gold medal winner of medical search at this point.”"

Mednar does "federated search" - "Federated search performs real-time, parallel searches of multiple information sources, merging the results into one page"

New Health Sites

What's New (Or Improved) In Health Sites , by Laura Landro, Wall Street Journal (Jan

As more people turn to the web for health information, more web resources come online.

"The Internet has long drawn people seeking information about health care. Last year, health Web sites drew about 72 million unique visitors, up 14% from a year earlier, according to comScore Inc., an online-marketing research firm that tracks some 200 such sites. Such strong growth comes as sites increasingly focus on some of today's leading consumer health concerns, including prescription-drug safety, quality of care, and the ability to network with other patients facing similar health problems."

Lists several sites for managing health, many of which are new and offer new types of information. For example:

+ Consumermedsafety.org: "The site offers consumers various methods for learning about medication safety. It also allows users to report to the institute, anonymously if they prefer, on problems or safety concerns with medications, including adverse reactions." - and more

+ "HazMap (hazmap.nlm.nih.gov): This federal database is designed to provide health and safety professionals and consumers with information about exposure to chemicals and biologic substances at work and with certain hobbies."

Portal-type sites are also on the list.

+ "HealthCentral.com: This is a network of sites covering various conditions such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and diabetes."

+ "Healthline.com—Includes a prescription medication image gallery; pill finder profiles to help identify medications by size, shape, color and visible markings ... "

Much more in the WSJ article - can be viewed for free and without a subscription.

Health Search Engines

The Top 10 Health Search Engines of 2008 by Hope Leman, AltSearchEngines (Dec 29, 2008)

This list of top health search engines isn't the standard WebMD, MedLinePlus. Instead there are new engines (Mednar is rated as #1), a different angle (WorldWiseScience.org as a global science gateway), archive of PowerPoint presentation related to health (at Vadlo), and several other takes on health/medical research. If you do health research, this is a posting to read.

UBC Health Library Wiki

The University of British Columbia Health Library runs a wiki for health librarians to share their expertise on searching and resources. There are many topics and tools covered, and some entries on topics such as use of Web 2.0, social tagging. There are also profiles of several health librarians.

From the main page:

"Increasingly, health librarians are the acknowledged information retrieval experts in medicine in the digital age - but we need better ways to share this expertise with each other, which is the major reason why this wiki has come into being. Our objective is to build a health library wiki with an international perspective, but also to emphasize issues affecting our work and practice in Canada. "

Health Portal for Healthcare Practioners

Vivisimo Powers Health Sciences Online Portal, Health Sciences Online (Dec 18)

Health Sciences Online (hso.info) is a new health portal to provide the "best medical information". It uses Vivisimo's Velocity Search Platform and has access to 50,000 world-class health sciences resources. It includes the Google language translation function. Main audience is healthcare practitioners and public health providers

This was championed by Erica Frank, a medical doctor and researcher at the University of British Columbia. There are several other participants including CDC, World Bank, the American College of Preventive Medicine, and the University of British Columbia.

From the About page:

"HSO provides free, online linkages to a comprehensive collection of top-quality courses and references in medicine, public health, pharmacy, dentistry, nursing, basic sciences, and other health sciences disciplines. These materials are donated, hosted, and maintained by our distinguished content partners, so quality is maintained, and materials can be constantly updated. "

Cyberchondria

Paging Dr. Google: Will Google Replace Your Doctor? by Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Dec 8)

New term - cyberchondria - coined by Microsoft in a study that indicates that getting the wrong information from the Internet on a health problem can make it worse. Now we see Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, using Google Alerts to get information. How much increased anxiety accompanies getting more information surely depends on the individual.

Reference Resources on the Web

The library without walls: images, medical dictionaries, atlases, medical encyclopedias free on web,by E. Giglia, E=Prints in Library and Information Science (Oct 25 2008)

Abstract

"The aim of this article was to present the ''reference room'' of the Internet, a real library without walls. The reader will find medical encyclopedias, dictionaries, atlases, e-books, images, and will also learn something useful about the use and reuse of images in a text and in a web site, according to the copyright law."

More from Deep Web Tech

Deep Web Tech Dives Into Vertical Search Portals by Paula Hane, Newsbreaks (Nov 13)

Paula Hane provides background on Deep Web Technologies and its work to create federated search engines (or portals - depending on your preference) that address specific information interests - business, medicine, science.

Biznar scans business sites, blogs, news, patent sources, and has received favourable reviews from Bob Berkman. Mednar is for medical research. This searches many US national health sites plus Google Scholar (interesting).

Deep Web provides the technology for Scitopia.org, Science.gov, WorldWIdeScience.org, U.S. Department of Defence search.

Google Plots Flu Trends

Google now tracking flu trends via search by Josh Lowensohn, Webware (Nov 11)

Wonder if the flu is in your neighbourhood? Google might have the answer for people in the US. Google's FluTrends site tracks people's searches on flu.

"What makes the technology so fascinating is that its data set goes back to 2003, and has been cross-referenced with the last several years of survey data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Google says that because its own system is based on a constant flow of searches as opposed to surveying techniques it's able to provide results one to two weeks faster than the CDC."

Activity this fall (October and November) has been low.

Postscript: The Scout Report has an extended entry about Google Flu Trends - Google makes a new foray into the world of public health with articles about Google Flu Trends and other resources such as the Mayo Clinic Flu Page.

Medical Literature - Legal Research perspective

Researching Medical Literature on the Internet - 2008, By Gloria Miccioli, LLRC (Sept 23)

Good collection -- "Although sites for consumers and support groups make up an important and extremely useful segment of health care web sites, I will concentrate on the needs of the professional researcher. For example, legal researchers, who often have to consult medical sources, usually do not have a medical library at hand. We can appreciate that the Internet provides free access to a great deal of the medical literature, either in full text or citation/abstract format, and that it offers relatively good search capabilities."

Waterfront Health Sites

Two online health site operators announce merger, By Stephanie Clifford, New York Times via Mercury News (Oct 3)

Revolution Health will be a bigger competitor to WebMD, currently the leading health site. Revolution Health Network has merged with "Waterfront Media, a publisher that owns several health Web sites."

"The new company [Waterfront ] will operate 24 sites, including RevolutionHealth.com and HealthTalk.com. The Everyday Health Network already includes EverydayHealth.com., along with niche sites like SouthBeachDiet.com. and the pregnancy site WhatToExpect.com.

Another human-powered site

Health Search Part III - OrganizedWisdom, AltSearchEngines (Jul 29)

Organized Wisdom - people powered heath search - review has instructions and screenshots - but this is another site with guides whose expertise and likely bias we have to assess. And then there are the ads.

"The mission at OrganizedWisdom is significant, but the goal is simple: to provide the best search service in the world for health by hand-crafting search results that physicians and consumers will recommend to their family and friends."

Semantic Medline

Cognition Launches SemanticMEDLINE, Newbreaks (Jul 28)

"Cognition Technologies (www.cognition.com) has introduced SemanticMEDLINE ( www.semanticmedline.com ), a new free service that enables complex health and life science material to be rapidly and efficiently discovered with greater precision and completeness using natural language processing (NLP) technology. This marks the first time that users can employ a natural, conversational sentence structure to find the most complex studies within the MEDLINE data set—the 18 million article abstract database of complex health information published by the National Library of Medicine."

PubMed Summary page

Drug Sensor Added to PubMed® Results Page, NLM Technical Bulletin (Jul 18)

A reason to use PubMed directly.

"The PubMed Summary results page will soon show results from other high-quality resources in a column to the right of the PubMed search results.

The first example of this new feature will be the Drug Sensor developed at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). This sensor detects whether a drug name is present in a user's search, and if so, presents exerpts of information from other resources that you can link to to read more (see Figure 1). The summary consists of a title (created from the drug name in the search query), some content from the linked resource, and an attribution line. At this time, about 200 drug names are included. "

Screenshot shows what it will look like. Doesn't seem to be rolled out yet (or doesn't show in Canada).

Mentioned in Resourceshelf.com

Reviews of Health Articles

Health News Review rates health and medical articles that appear in US media - network programming and popular US newspapers and magazines.

Healthcare professionals or medical researchers in US hospitals and universities review articles against a set of 10 criteria for accuracy, balance, and completeness. The criteria alone are helpful for the online health consumer to know about.

Email alerts and RSS feeds are available.

This is funded by Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making - "a non-profit organization dedicated to ensuring that patients understand their choices, and have the information they need to make sound decisions affecting their health and well being."

GlobalHealthFacts.org

GlobalHealthFacts.org keeps data by country of diseases and demographics. This is a project of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

"The data are displayed in tables, charts, and color-coded maps. Additionally, the custom data sheet application allows users to compare up to five countries against any or all of the site’s indicators, which can then be converted into a PDF file, printed, emailed or saved. Data can also be downloaded for custom analyses."

There is also Globalhealthreporting.org

Hakia for PubMed

hakia Adds 10 million PubMed Articles to its Semantic Search Engine, Hakia (June 12)

Hakia has added PubMed.

"PubMed.gov is one of the largest data aggregation points in medicine, and the only one that covers more than 4000 journal entries. We are proud to announce that hakia has QDEXed more than 10 million PubMed abstracts, and is now offering PubMed search exclusively at pubmed.hakia.com, or at hakia.com as part of a general search."

BLog post demonstrates that Hakia can find articles that Google and Pubmed itself can't.

Better ads at Healthline?

Vertical Search Engine Healthline Launches “Semantic Ad Network” by Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (June 8)

"Vertical health search engine Healthline has introduced what it’s calling the Healthline Media Network, a contextual ad network for medical and health-related sites. According to the company, the new ad network will utilize Healthline’s “semantic health search technology” to better understand partner page content and do a better job of matching ads accordingly."

Google Health screenshots

Screen Shots Of Google Health by Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (May 19)

Google is proceeding with a personalized Health portal. Gary Schwartz has some screenshots.

Postscript: Google Health and You -- Andrew Goodman at Traffick.com wouldn't sign up even if it were available in Canada (it's only US). He wrote -- "For some reason the whole business leaves me feeling uneasy about my privacy. The centralizing impulse of these global info-organizers runs counter, perhaps, to more sensible old-school approaches to information and power: diffused and broken-up relationships of power & authority, while less efficient at times, safeguard us against an unhealthy concentration of power and panopticon-like effects."

Google Health: Great idea, but scary as all get out By Rafe Needleman, WebWare (May 19)

"Google Health is an important initiative, if only because it shows users how completely broken medical record-keeping is right now. But this product comes with a warning label."

Personal Health Records

Warning on Storage of Health Records by Steve Lohr, New York Times (Apr 17)

Would you store your medical records online at Microsoft's Health Vault or Google's new Health service? Will this make access and treatment easier for patients or be the base for some massive scandal arising from use of information for marketing or for violating privacy?

"In an article in The New England Journal of Medicine, two leading researchers warn that the entry of big companies like Microsoft and Google into the field of personal health records could drastically alter the practice of clinical research and raise new challenges to the privacy of patient records."

Healthzone for the GTA

Torontonians have a new consumer health site created just for them thanks to the Toronto Star. Healthzone -- http://www.healthzone.ca/ has health advice, information on diseases and medications (from MediResource), news and columns, and (the best part) finding tools for doctors. clinics and pharmacies in the Greater Toronto area.

Brandie Weikle, the editor of this new site, described Healthzone.ca in this Welcome posting.

So while there’s health advice here that applies wherever you live, we’ve also got:

+ great databases to help you find a physician, walk-in clinic or pharmacy in your neighbourhood,

+ breaking health news from the Ontario Ministry of Health, local hospitals and Toronto Public Health, including important updates about air quality,

+ listings of Toronto health clubs, spas, nutritionists, yoga studios, specialists and so much more.

Look up medical conditions and medications in our Health InfoCentre. Read Megan Ogilvie’s latest analysis in Diet Decoder and Fitness Decoder. Learn about study results and what they really mean. Read up on women’s health, men’s health, holistic medicine and aging well. Fans of Dr. Murray Waldman’s Critical Care column The Star can find his web-exclusive advice column here.

The listings may be the most valuable part. Hopefully, all clinics, doctors, dentists will make sure they are listed. (My clinic and doctor are missing from the list). The list does include alternative holistic and naturopathic clinics.

Medical Portal and Search

SearchMedica Powers Search on ModernMedicine Altsearchengines (Mar 24)

"Healthcare professionals who use Advanstar’s ModernMedicine.com will experience enhanced Web search results as a result of a newly announced strategic partnership with SearchMedica , the medical professionals’ search engine. ModernMedicine.com is an innovative, online clinical decision-support resource."

Postscript Mar 25 -- CMPMedica Expands SearchMedica.com eContent -- added "vertical search applications for specialist medical conditions".

"SearchMedica.com is an advertising supported web-based service that connects physicians and other medical professionals to credible, trusted, and editorially approved medical websites, online journals, and other clinical resources." Was co-developed with Convera Corporation.

Google and EHR

The real holy grail of medicine - A secure electronic health record would be a medical breakthrough - and would transform health care - by
MICHAEL EVANS, Globe and Mail (Mar 6)

"In a perfect world, an EHR would create a seamless pathway to share your health information across the continuum of care between your family physician, specialists, labs, hospitals and other health-care providers, no matter where they were located."

Google and Microsoft are jumping ahead of governments in promoting and enabling the "electronic health care" that could lead to "universal" access to health care records. Is this good?

"When I think of Google I think of simplicity, subtle advertising, "cyberchondria" (an Internet-induced fear of a terrible diagnosis) and cool innovation. When I think of Google in the context of an EHR, I feel both revulsion and attraction. On one hand, my inner conspiracy theorist worries about one of America's biggest corporations having access to personal medical data. On the other, the riddle of building a universal EHR has thwarted major corporations and governments worldwide and I can't help but think that Google stands a pretty good chance of creating an elegant solution to a problem I see every day: not having all the facts about a patient at my fingertips."

What will Google Health really be like?

Google health won't be ad-supported by Travis Reed, AP via Toronto Star (Feb 28)

Google CEO Eric Schmidt spoke about Google's health project at the annual conference of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society.

"Schmidt said the service was merely a platform for users to store their medical information. It will be an open system inviting third parties to build direct-to-consumer services like medication tables or immunization reminders. But Schmidt emphasized no data would be shared without the consumer's consent. "

"The interface demonstrated at the conference has menu sections for several areas: health notices, drug interactions, health conditions, medications, allergies, immunizations, procedures and test results. It connects the user with online research published about any condition they might have and notifies them of potential dangers like adverse drug interactions."

Note: "Future partners included companies with pharmacies like Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Walgreen Co. and Duane Reade Inc. and health care providers like Aetna Inc. and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Schmidt wouldn't specify what any particular company might contribute."

Also -- Google Previews Google Health - Nancy Gohring, IDG News Service via PC World (Feb 28)

Mentions Microsoft's project - "Archrival Microsoft last year launched an online health care service, HealthVault, to allow users to store and share health records online. Users can also feed data from devices like diabetes meters and heart rate monitors into their HealthVault accounts."

Google Health Records Management

Google To Store Patient Medical Records AP via CBS News (Feb 21)

Google is getting closer to creating a health records system for consumers through a pilot at the Cleveland Clinic which is looking to improve its existing system for personal health records. Marissa Mayer of Google is now overseeing this project.

"Google Inc. will begin storing the medical records of a few thousand people as it tests a long-awaited health service that's likely to raise more concerns about the volume of sensitive information entrusted to the Internet search leader.

The pilot project to be announced Thursday will involve 1,500 to 10,000 patients at the Cleveland Clinic who volunteered to an electronic transfer of their personal health records so they can be retrieved through Google's new service, which won't be open to the general public. "

What's new at Healthline

Vertical Search Provider Healthline Beefs Up Content, Features Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (Feb 14)

The health portal Healthline has added content and tools -- more aids for getting information on drugs, tools for risk assessment, products from HealthPricer, and content partners (StayWell , AHFS (the American Hospital Formulary System) and Natural Standard).

Of interest: "Healthline has financial backing from Aetna, GE/NBC, JHK Investments LLC, Kaiser Permanente, Mitsui & Co., Ltd., Reed Elsevier, US News & World Report, and VantagePoint Venture Partners."

Petition to save Canadian Health Network

Friends of CHN, the Canadian Health Network, are collecting signatures for their petition to Prime Minister Harper and Health Minister Tony Clement to save the Canadian Health Network. They will be sending the petition on February 14th asking them to “have a heart” and save the CHN.

The Canadian Health Network is among Canada's oldest, best established and most extensive web site for people seeking information on health questions. It has materials for all ages and a very wide range of topics. It would be a great loss to Canadian to close this, especially since the alternative is the more politically skewed Healthy Canadians from the Government of Canada.

Message from Friends of CHN

Friends of CHN (www.friendsofchn.ca) is an ad hoc group whose objective is to focus attention on the closure and its impact, and to try to turn this decision around. We have created a petition addressed to Prime Minister, Stephen Harper and Minister of Health, Tony Clement with the following message:

“We the undersigned support the Canadian Health Network. We demand that the funding cut required of the Public Health Agency of Canada be rescinded, that full, stable funding for the Canadian Health Network be restored immediately, and that this valuable Canadian health information resource continue to be developed to become the best of its kind in the world.”

Please act today to preserve the Canadian Health Network. Sign this petition at www.thepetitionsite.com/1/saveCHN and add your voice to the many that are defending non-commercial, publicly funded health information for all Canadians.

Time is running out! We will be sending this petition to the federal government on February 14, 2008. Sign now and tell your friends and colleagues about this action.

While you’re signing things, send a letter (or make use of a sample letter we have provided) to your MP, the Minister of Health, and the Prime Minister; for addresses and sample letters see www.friendsofchn.ca/write.htm

Friends of CHN

Friends of CHN have opened a website - Friends of CHN - as a base for campaigning for restoration of funding for the work of the Canadian Health Network - "Canada’s number one source of non-commercial bilingual health information". Learn more about what you can do to keep the Canadian Health Network online.

Canadian Health Network

Don't pull plug on Canadian Health Network by Andre Picard, Globe and Mail (Dec 13)

The Public Health Agency of Canada has said it would end funding of $ 7 million to the Canadian Health Network because it has been ordered to cut $16.7-million from its grants. As it happens the Conservative Government has opened a new Healthy Canadians website (healthycanadians.gc.ca) with Health Minister Tony Clement on the front page. Is this a coincidence?

Catherine Bryant of Friends of CHN posted a comment with information on what we can do now to try to reverse the decision to close CHN. See her posting Speak out against the closure. One very easy thing to do is to sign the petition at http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/saveCHN

Women's Health Matters in Canada

Women's Health Matters (www.womenshealthmatters.ca) at Women’s College Hospital has created a guide to doing health research on the Web.

Women Wading Through the Web: A Health Toolkit is "to assist the many women who have asked us for help in navigating the often confusing maze of health information on the Web".

The toolkit (PDF format) covers:

+ How to use the Internet to search for health information: using search engines, subject directories, and specialty sites.
+ How to judge the quality of a web site
+ How to interpret medical research
+ How to understand media and web-based information
+ Recommended websites - principally Canadian.

There is also a discussion group at Women's Health Matters called "Le Club" with several forums on many health issues. The moderators are health research experts and can assist with suggestions on how to go about researching a question.

The toolkit and the discussion forums are excellent resources for Canadian women. Be sure to download the guide and browse the forums.

Kudos to the women’s health experts at Women's College Hospital for creating this site and toolkit.

There is a French language version of the website (not the toolkit) - Femmes en santé

HealthWeb Recommends ..

HealthWeb is Discontinuing Operations was a "collaborative project of over 20 health sciences libraries in the Greater Midwest Region of the National Network of Libraries of Medicine with contract support from the National Library of Medicine."

It has closed because "Users want deep linking capabilities (a la Google) and are navigating away from list oriented sites such as HealthWeb."

True enough - this should be a warning to all others working on directories to health sites.

Notice is especially interesting because of the three recommendations to HealthWeb users:

+ Hardin MD (Hardin Meta Directory): http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/hardin/md/ a
"directory of directories" for health and medicine. Done by the Hardin Library for the Health Sciences at the University of Iowa.

+ MedlinePlus : http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ - " A consumer oriented site that brings together authoritative information from the National Library of Medicine (NLM), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and other government agencies and health-related organizations."

+ Google Health Co-op: http://www.google.com/coop/topics/Health - where
"subject expert individuals and organizations to establish accounts, and then create annotations with a limited number of categories or limits to links in the Google Health database".

Elsevier's DoctorPortal

Elsevier Launches Doctor Portal, the Independent Online Voice of UK Doctors , Elsevier (Oct 2)

DoctorPortal.co.uk - new online community resource from Elsevier in the UK with Doctor and Hospital Doctor magazines.

"Elsevier, the world's leading publisher of science and health information, has announced the launch of DoctorPortal, an online repository of the most current medical information. DoctorPortal is advertiser supported and based around enhanced online versions of the respected and freely available Doctor and Hospital Doctor magazines. Aimed at the UK’s 150,000 primary and secondary care doctors DoctorPortal promises to be the news source for UK doctors."

PDRHealth for Consumers

Thomson Healthcare Launches PDRhealth.com as Free Consumer Site Newsbreaks (Nov 19)

The Physicians' Desk Reference comes online as a new and free health vertical from Thomson Healthcare. PDRhealth.com has information on drugs, diseases and conditions, and also provides online health tools. (There's no web search.)

"Thomson Healthcare (www.thomsonhealthcare.com), publisher of the Physicians’ Desk Reference, has launched PDRhealth.com as a free site for consumers. PDRhealth.com is based on the same information platform that Thomson Healthcare uses to create the Physicians’ Desk Reference database. This drug information is then paired with comprehensive diagnostic tools. The new PDRhealth.com is designed to put critical health information into the hands of consumers. Individuals can also sign up to receive electronic newsletters, alerts on new clinical trials, and any new information about prescription drugs."

Health Information on the Web

Searching for sound medical advice online by Michael Evans, Globe and Mail (Nov 13, 2007)

"Not sure if your child is battling the flu or asthma? Here are a few tips on how to search Web resources before seeing the doctor".

Michael Evans recommend three starting points for parents to use for health information on their children - none sponsored by an industry.

+ MedlinePlus
+ HealthyOntario.com
+ CanadianHealthNetwork.com

Also mentions AboutKidsHealth.ca

MedlinePlus with Vivisimo

Vivisimo Comes to Town: New Site Search Engine Allows Easier, More Efficient Navigation of MedlinePlus and NLM Web Site, ResourceShelf (Oct 12)

Great news indeed - US National Library of Medicine uses Vivisimo clustering technology to improve search at MedlinePlus .

"After extensive research, NLM selected search engine software from the Pittsburgh-based company Vivisimo. Vivisimo is also the current search solution for the www.usa.gov site (formerly FirstGov), which contains online information from the entire spectrum of U.S. government agencies. ... The new search engine also expands queries using synonyms specific to the sites and medical synonyms from the NLM Unified Medical Language System (UMLS)."

Calorie Counter

Calorie Count from About.com Health - browse foods, brands, activities - figure out calories in vs consumed.

NYTimes.com Introduces New Section on Health and Wellness Press Release (Oct 2)

Google Health Update

Google cares about health data Reuters via Silicon.com (Oct 18)

Google is continuing its project to apply web search to health information. Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of Search Products & User Experience, is now acting head of the business. This goes beyond consumer health information and could include personal health records.

"Google started out two years ago on a service called Google Co-op. This taps various expert organisations to categorise high-quality health and other information, to make it easier to search and find on the web, Mayer said." But Google is also looking at "creating a special layer of doctor and medical-related locations on its online Google Maps service. "

Also Google Health To Launch In Early 2008, Greg Sterling, Search ENgine Land (Oct 18)

Google Moving Forward on Health Initiative Juan Carlos Perez, IDG via PC World (Oct 18)

Marissa Mayer spoke with IDG News - "With health records stored in a central server, patients will be able to access them from anywhere, whether they move to a new city or are traveling while on vacation, so that, in an emergency, unfamiliar health care providers can get a comprehensive view of their health history, she said."

About a prototype for Google Health: "According to the Times, the Google Health prototype is designed to let individuals create a health profile for themselves that includes information about medications and conditions. Google Health also features a "health guide" with suggested treatments and drug interaction warnings, pages with health-related reminders and health provider directories, the Times reported then." [August 2007]

Healia wins Award

Healia Selected as a 2007 Tibbetts Award Winner Market Wire via Market Watch (Oct 10)

Healia is a health search engine that aims to provide personalized results.

"The SBIR funding received by Healia from the National Cancer Institute was a critical success factor in Healia's initial R&D efforts. "Early on, the SBIR Program and the National Cancer Institute shared our vision that a health-optimized search engine providing high-quality and personalized results would be immensely beneficial to consumers," said Dr. Eng. "Healia continues to carry forward this shared vision of making health information more accessible and relevant to consumers.""

Internet Use by the Disabled

E-patients With a Disability or Chronic Disease Susannah Fox, PEW Internet and American Life (Oct 9)

"The new survey data nails down what many people have long suspected -
people with chronic conditions are disproportionately offline, but once
they are online, they are just as enthusiastic as other internet users.
After detailing their general online interests, the report focuses on
how this special population uses the internet to gather health
information. Not surprisingly, once they are online, people with chronic
conditions are avid e-patients."

Full report at http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/222/report_display.asp

Visual Medical Dictionary

Visual Medical Dictionary from Cure Hunter Inc is truly visual, an excellent example of information visualization. It displays the MeSH taxonomy of terms as a tree along with a network map showing the relationship of the disease or condition with other diseases, therapies, and treatments.

The dictionary has links to CureHunter's research, such as their Patient-Physician Summary Reports, for which there are fees. The free version does provide some sample data for key drugs and agents obtained from the FDA and other sources.

From the CureHunter website:

"The CureHunter Discovery Engine is the world's only fully unified and integrated numeric index of all known drugs, biologically active agents, diseases and empirical statements of all effective clinical outcomes published in the United States National Library of Medicine.

The engine you are accessing online right now computes: 121,000 drug and biological agent data points X 11,600 diseases X 15,000,000 peer-reviewed research articles X several hundred thousand additional variables of Gene, Protein, Enzyme, Hormone, Growth Factor, Ligand, Kinase, Receptor, Inhibitor and other important small biologically active molecules. "

There is a 5 -minute introductory screencast at http://www.curehunter.com/screencast/research/

The lay person can use this dictionary to research diseases and treatments. The professional may want to register for the newsletter and updates.

Web 2.0 Health Sites

Healthy growth in Web 2.0 medical sites By Barbara Feder Ostrov, Mercury News (Sep 21)

We've come a long way with health information and support on the Web, at least in the United States -- " Already, consumers can go online to rate their doctors (ratemds.com), comparison shop for medical procedures by price and location (vimo.com), search for medical information (webmd.com, healia.com) and share experiences with others on health-specific social networking sites (dailystrength.org, patientslikeme.com). In this universe, patients and doctors alike blog about medical conditions, post video journals, and offer comfort and a helping hand."

Healia adds search tools

Healia Launches Consumer-Friendly Search Engine for PubMed/Medline and Clinical Trials Information, Marketwire via Market Watch (Sep 20)

"Healia ( www.healia.com) announced today the launch of two new search engine tools -- Healia PubMed/Medline Search and Clinical Trials Search -- to help consumers find relevant biomedical literature and clinical trials information. The announcement was made during the Health 2.0 User Generated Healthcare Conference in San Francisco."

Kosmix RightHealth - forerunner for topics

Kosmix has two versions of its health search - Kosmix Health with selected resources, topics, news, videos, and Kosmix RightHealth. RightHealth is the newest - also with topics, news, articles, videos and forums. They are very similar and might just be different presentations of the same content.

Charles Knight at Read/Write Web reviewed RightHealth - Kosmix rolls out RightHealth and more! (Sept 12) The RightHealth is a new style of presenting a variety of content and format on a topic.

"The Kosmix technology will cull all of the content on the Web to generate pages algorithmically without any human intervention, giving users an encyclopedia of knowledge that is dynamic, limitless in scale, and constantly changing based on their precise needs."

Open Access at CIHR

New research policy a victory for 'open access' by Michael Geist, Toronto Star (Sep 10)

"The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the federal government's health research granting agency, unveiled a new open access policy for the research that it funds."

Beginning in 2008 "grant recipients will be required to make every effort to ensure that all publications are freely accessible through the publisher's website or an online repository within six months of publication".

"The online repository approach – often referred to as "self-archiving" – relies on smart search engines to index millions of articles and make them easily accessible with the right search query. "

Hopefully, the federal government's two other major granting councils - Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) - will do the same.

Health Videos at Kosmix

Truveo Partners with Kosmix to Help Consumers Easily Find Topic Specific Health Videos, Business Wire via Marketwatch (Sep 6)

"Truveo announced today that the company's video search engine ( http://www.truveo.com) is being used by Kosmix(TM) to present topic-relevant videos on its health site, www.righthealth.com, giving users a starting point to explore any health topic they might want from the common cold to diabetes to autism. Kosmix is also using Truveo's capabilities on its sites focused on autos and travel."

Google's Work on Health

Google Health for the Public Good, Richard Brandt, Technology Review (Aug 29)

Google's working on a health-information system. Google Blogoscoped had screenshots. It's code named Weaver and many have seen ulterior motives. This posting points out the good - a system to help in researching health issues, a way to find doctors, and a way to find support groups.

White Coat, Black Art - CBC Radio

In the final episode of White Coat, Black Art on CBC Radio, Dr Brian Goldman looked at doctors' use of games - how dexterity in playing online games can help develop skills for some surgerical procedures, and ways of looking of information - specifically "googling" the symptoms. Some really do use Google. Others mentioned specific web resources.

+ eMedicine from WebMD - said to be excellent for its coverage to diseases and health matters.

+ Uptodate for answering clinical questions. Subscription required.

One doctor gives his patients a list of web sites they should use when researching their illness and warns them against using just anything that comes up in a search.

Today's program will be repeated on CBC Radio One on Sundays September 2 at 11:00 a.m.

Health Smart Answers at Ask

Searching for Better Health, Ask.com blog (Aug 27)

Ask has partnered with Healthline Networks to create smart answers for health. There will surely be a demand. The posting mentions that in a recent study 70% of respondents said that the Internet is a primary source of health information.

Searching for Health

Statistics: The Cyberchondriac: How Often Do U.S. Adults Search for Health Care Information Online?, ResourceShelf (Aug 6)

"Eighty-four percent of online U.S. adults and 71% of all U.S. adults have ever searched for health-related information online, according to a new survey by Harris Interactive."

Healia Part of Meredith

Health Search Engine Healia Acquired by Meredith Corporation, Bill Hartzer (June 18)

"The vertical search engine Healia, a health search engine that specializes in finding high-quality and personalized health information, has been acquired by Meredith Corporation. Meredith is one of the USA’s leading media and marketing companies whose businesses center around magazine and book publishing, television broadcasting, integrated marketing, and interactive media."

Revolution Health Open

AOL founder launches health care Web site, Dawn Kawamoto, CNet News (Apr 19)

RevolutionHealth.com is online. "RevolutionHealth.com, operated through Case's Revolution Health Group, enters a market that is dominated by WebMD.com, and other players, such as Yahoo Health and the Mayo Clinic's Web site MayoClinic.com."

Front page has It's Good - and Healthy - to be Green.

Authors and Articles in PubMed

April 2007 InfoTip: Cool Tool For Finding Experts, Mary Ellen Bates - describes her use of Authoratory.com, which has mined the PubMed database for authors and their articles.

OpenMedicine.ca

Former CMAJ editors help launch online medical journal, CBC News via Sympatico News (Apr 18)

Editors from the troubled Canadian Medical Association Journal have launched an open-access journal, free of fees and advertisements, called "Open Medicine".

The first issue of Open Medicine has 59 online pages in web and pdf formats, some of these discussing the purpose and objectives of this journal. Bravo.

RevolutionHealth.com - Apr 19 launch

AOL founder to unveil health care Web site, New York Times via CNet (Apr 15)

Steve Case, formerly of AOL, has bankrolled a new health site for consumers - RevolutionHealth.com . "He says the time is ripe for a dominant health care brand--one that could be as powerful as Starbucks in latte or Nike in fitness. So far he has devoted more than $100 million of his money toward that goal with the RevolutionHealth.com Web site." The site will be aimed primarily at women for themselves and family.

"There will also be 1,500 medical conditions that can be sorted by the ailment or treatment, with related comments from experts and from other users of the site. And like other health Web sites, it will provide a directory of doctors by specialty and location, along with short reviews by patients." Also - personal health records, information from other sources like Mayo Clinic, personal pages and more.

Leading health sites today in terms of traffic are: WebMD (40 million users / month), NIH.gov, from the National Institutes of Health; Yahoo Health; Mayoclinic.com; and About.com Health, owned by The New York Times Co.

Google also gets traffic thanks to changes through Google Co-op program for labelling / tagging sites. "By typing a search term like "sore throat," for example, a Google user is led to relevant information about potential causes and risks, treatments and tests, and alternative medicines."

ReleMed for PubMed

New Search Engine for Finding Articles in PubMed, ResearchBuzz (Mar 5)

"There’s a new search engine from the University of Virginia School of Medicine that searches PubMed for medical literature by assigning relevance to results in addition to just looking for keywords. ReleMed, as the engine is called, is available at http://www.relemed.com/ ."

More Health Search

A Checkup of Online Health Sites by Paula J. Hane, ITI Newslink (Mar 1)

Many new health portals and resources have come to the Web.

"EverydayHealth.com came out of its beta version. Healthline.com launched a new Symptom Search feature. A startup from Steve Case, Revolution Health, is providing previews of its new site. TauMed is a recently launched search engine and health portal. (Disclaimer—I have not done extensive testing on these sites so I can't provide recommendations or comparisons.)"

Not to forget old favourites, Hane reminds us a few of the well established resoures: U.S. National Institutes of Health (http://health.nih.gov), MedlinePlus from the National Library of Medicine (www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus), the MayoClinic.com site, and WebMD.

Online Health Search Habits

Americans Looking for Health Information Online Are Exposed to and Use User-Generated Media on a Regular Basis, "Some may trust Internet content because they are relying on sources they view as credible", PRNewswire via Marketwatch (Feb 26)

Envision Solutions, LLC, did a follow-up study to the Pew Internet & American Life Project that found Americans didn't validate the health information they found on the Internet. Envision's report shows that people do identify the government and other established health sites and use them, but they are also exposed to a lot of user-generated media (blogs, forums) in search results, including Wikipedia.

Diving Deeper into Online Health Search is at http://www.envisionsolutionsnow.com/healthsearch.html

It lists the websites searchers are visiting for health content for selected terms.

Conclusion:

+ Internet users rely on government, non-profit and corporate Websites they view as reliable and may not do any further checking.
+ They are using user-generated media especially Wikipedia. "Because Wikipedia is referenced so often, those maintaining it should take steps to ensure that its health-related content is accurate."
+ People are reading the websites and blogs of “citizen medical experts” like crazymeds.org

HEALTHMap

Resource of the Week: HEALTHmap, Shirl Kennedy, ResourceShelf (Feb 22)

HealthMap - Global disease alert map.

"A quick view of HEALTHmap shows you where more than 50 diseases have been reported around the world, who is reporting and how “hot” an outbreak is based on the number of reports. Drill down by content and city or narrow by disease and read what has been reported in the last 30 days."

Health Portal for the EU

Health-EU Portal is the official public health portal of the European Union. It has information on health, lifestyle, environment. policies, and health care. )

Healthline's Symptom Search

New Healthline Symptom Search Dramatically Improves One of the Most Popular Online Health Research Activities, Marketwatch (Feb 13)

Healthline allows you to search according to symptoms you are experiencing. Build a symptom list and consider the possible causes.

"Symptom Search is the only Internet symptom tool to use a semantic medical taxonomy -- a relational database of over 1 million diseases, symptoms and their synonyms -- to analyze queries and produce ranked results. The latest extension of Healthline's Medically Guided Search(TM) platform, Symptom Search provides consumers with more relevant, accurate, and faster results than competing symptom research products."

From the press release:

-- GUIDED RESEARCH: The Symptom Search "type-ahead" feature allows users
to start with the general terms that are frequently top of mind and suggests additional terms to help quickly narrow their search for symptoms. For example, if a user begins to type in "c-o-u-g-h," they will not only see "cough," but a medically-reviewed list of 20 other types of coughs such as painful cough, hacking cough, night cough, and so on, to guide and refine the symptom search.

-- SEARCH ON RELATED SYMPTOMS: The Related Symptoms feature recognizes
user inputs, like "fever" and "muscle aches," and suggests symptoms that frequently occur in health articles mapped to these symptoms -- complete with definitions and illustrations.

-- COMPREHENSIVENESS: Symptom Search covers more than 3,500 symptoms and 900 diseases -- more than ten times the number of symptoms covered by WebMD, MayoClinic or any major consumer symptom research tool.

-- INTERACTIVE, SEARCH DRIVEN APPROACH: To offer the ability to explore
possible causes and learn as they go, Symptom Search allows consumers to
enter any combination of symptoms they choose. They can also quickly remove
a symptom or clear their Symptom List to start again. Other tools don't allow for the same experimentation and exploration; typically, symptom combinations are very limited, if they are available at all.

-- QUALITY/CONFIDENCE: In order to design the best search algorithms and
provide consumers with relevant, high quality results, Healthline analyzed raw data from multiple years of CDC surveys to rank the likelihood that a health condition would be detected. This is unique among both clinical and consumer symptom research resources.

MedlinePlus and Vivisimo

Vivísimo to Power Web Searching for NLM Sites by Paula J. Hane, Newbreaks (Jan 29)

National Library of Medicine will be using Vivisimo in its search platform but can't say when. This will include NLM's consumer health Web site, MedlinePlus, but not PubMed.

Raul Valdes-Perez, CEO of Vivísimo described it technology - "Vivísimo's clustering technology creates its "categories" on-the-fly from the search results, using terms in the title, snippet, and any other available textual description (including metadata) in the search results themselves." MedlinePlus has been using "controlled vocabulary" for guided navigation. You can compare the two by using the a Vivisimo "concept" site and also MedlinePlus.

"Preliminary looks at Vivísimo's concept demo have provided satisfying results in comparison to the current search capabilities and results presentation at MedlinePlus. Industry expert Janice McCallum, president of GrandView Insight, Inc., really liked Vivísimo's categorized display in the demo. She commented: "Vivísimo presents search results that are easier to interpret because they are displayed in a more visually attractive and meaningful way."

Much as I have always liked Vivisimo's clustering, including the ClusterMed product, I'm not as impressed by the comparison of the "concept" demo vs the existing structured MedlinePlus. Will have to wait and see if the Vivisimo's clustering is used to enhance (preferred) or replace.

New WebMD Health Portal

WebMD Announces Next-Generation Consumer Health Portal PRNewswire via Marketwatch (Jan 22) -- WebMD

WebMD announced "the next generation of its leading consumer health information portal, together with free, widespread access to its WebMD Personal Health Record. The new portal will enrich the user experience for the more than 35 million people who turn to the WebMD Health network each month. A preview of the new site can be accessed on the homepage of WebMD.com or at www.pv.webmd.com ."

Avian Flu

Avian Influenza Resources created by Health Sciences Library at the University of Michigan.

The list goes to a set of del.icio.us links created by the Health Sciences Library at the University of Michigan. Wonderful use of del.icio.us.

Vivisimo and NLM

Vivisimo Clustering Technology Coming to National Library of Medicine and MedlinePlus, Resourceshelf (Jan 18)

UK PubMed Central - New

UK PubMed Central Launched, Newbreaks (Jan 22)

"Based on a model currently used by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), UK PubMed Central (UKPMC; www.ukpmc.ac.uk) has launched to provide free access to a permanent online archive of peer-reviewed research papers in the medical and life sciences."

Revolution Health - Web 2.0

AOL co-founder Case opens online health site, Reuters via Yahoo (Jan 22)

"AOL co-founder Steve Case launched a health Web site on Monday that will offer free and paid services including social networking tools for sharing information on doctors, insurance and other health topics."

Revolution Health is to be an "online location for resources on health conditions and healthy living topics combined with community and social networking features". Subscription to premium services will be $100 / Year.

Also - Revolution Health Launches Psych Central News, (Jan 22) - This review raises questions about the ratings of drugs at the new health site.

Google Health URL trumped by Steve Case? by Donna Bogatin, ZDNet

Notes that "While RevolutionHealth packages and promotes itself as a “friends and family” health community, it is building a robust health care provisioning infrastructure platform which will be available to consumers as a “premium” health services membership on an annual fee basis."

NIH Senior Health - Brilliant

Something brilliant - a health site for seniors with adjustable text, audio text reading, and contrast controls. This is the NIH Senior Health site (http://nihseniorhealth.gov/). It may be intended for seniors but absolutely everyone can benefit. This is web design as it should be and is especially applicable to e-learning.

This website was developed by the National Institute on Aging and the National Library of Medicine, both part of the National Institutes of Health.

Mentioned in Senior Service: Aging Learners Are Just Like the Rest of Us, eLearn (Nov 2006)

Health Vertical Search

Healia and Kosmix: Search engines for health information., Pandia Search News (Nov 19) - presents Healia and Kosmix Health as vertical search engines for health information.

Internet as a source for health information

Rural Canada and acccess to health information -- Harris, R.M., Wathen, C.N. & Fear, J.M. (2006). "Searching for health information in rural Canada. Where do residents look for health information and what do they do when they find it?" Information Research, 12(1) paper 274. [Available at http://InformationR.net/ir/12-1/paper274.html]

Reports on barriers people in rural areas have in finding health information. Doctors are the main source (60%), and the Internet is a strong second (59%). But there are many problems.

"Forty-one percent of all the respondents who said they had looked for health information did not use the Internet. Of these, two-thirds told the interviewer that they had no access or only limited access to the Internet. Others explained that they did not use the Internet for health information because it is too hard to find things, there is too much information, or the information they do find is too difficult to understand. Twelve percent said they did not know how to use the Internet at all or did not know how to use it to find health information. Others said they 'never considered using the Internet for health information', preferred to rely on the doctor for information or 'would rather talk face-to-face with a person'. One respondent told the interviewer that using the Internet for health information could result in a 'false diagnosis' and that it is better to rely on the doctor."

Healia

Health Information Search Engines Emerge -- Growing Consumer Demand for Health Information Increases Need for Better Quality, More Personalized Searches, Says Expert at 11th World Congress on Internet in Medicine -- Business Wire via Marketwatch (Oct 18)

"Increasingly consumers find themselves in need of search engines that address the unique complexities of health information search and that can provide more reliable and personalized search results. Recently, several health-vertical search engines, including Healia ( www.healia.com), have launched in attempt to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of the health search process."

Healthline Again

Merriam-Webster Selects Healthline to Deliver Medical Information Resources to Millions of Health Seekers -- Healthline's Exclusive Online Search and Navigation Capability Outperforms Conventional Health Searches With Precise, Medically Relevant and Reliable Content -- Marketwire via Marketwatch (Aug 1)

"Close on the heels of winning the 2006 Webby Awards' People's Voice Award for Best Health Web Site, Healthline Networks ( www.healthline.com) today announced it has been chosen by Merriam-Webster to enhance its leading language reference website with contextually relevant medical information and resource links whenever consumers look up health-related words on Merriam-Webster OnLine ( www.merriam-webster.com)."

Google Health Portal

Google Health Scrapbook: Google's Health Portal, SearchEngineWatch blog (july 7) - rumours about a personal Google health portal.

Google Scholar Blog - Health

Discovery - UBC Academic Blog - Google Scholar Blog - concerned with academic research related to health and medicine. This blog is the work of Dean Giustini, reference librarian at the Biomedical Branch Library of the Vancouver Hospital and Health Sciences Centre.

Biomedical Journals

Free online access to nearly 200 years of medical research, press release, Wellcome Trust (May 11)

"Complete back issues covering nearly 200 years of historically significant biomedical journals are being made freely available online as a result of a landmark project launched today at the Wellcome Trust headquarters in London."

Finding Good Health Information

Dr Google Is In by DR. MICHAEL EVANS, Globe and Mail (May 8)

A doctor considers the findings from the Pew Internet and American Life study into people's use of web search engines to answer medical questions.

More health information and services are going online. "At Healthyontario.com, the government health portal for the public, a new diabetes centre has all these things as well as the opportunity to e-mail questions to an expert." But, he says, people may not find this site and that answer through Google.

Google (and the others) could do more to earn their advertising dollar. "Imagine if Google contacted 100 universities, 100 hospitals and 100 governments and asked them each to create a multimedia centre of excellence around a particular disease or health communication."

Good article - catch it while you can.

People Turn to Internet for Health

Finding Answers Online in Sickness and in Health, Pew Internet Life and American Life (May 2)

"Fully 58% of those who found the internet to be crucial or important during a loved one’s recent health crisis say the single most important source of information was something they found online."

Reviewing Health News

Web site to rate content of health care news, AP via Star Ledger (Apr 17) -- University of Minnesota journalism professor Gary Schwitzer reviews and rates health news stories at the new site Health News & Review . The article states that he "fashioned the site after similar efforts in Australia and Canada".

First review on today's page was the New York Time's story, 'Low-Calorie Diet May Lead to Longer Life' - it received one star.

See comments by Genie Tyburski, New Web Site Rates Health News (April 18)

State of Health Search

The Zeitgeist of Online Health Search: Implications for a Consumer-Centric Health System by Daniel P. Lorence, PhD, JD; Liza Greenberg, RN, MPH, Journal of Internal Medicine (Mar 24)

"This study sought to create a benchmark technology assessment of online health search trends and practices, with corresponding evaluation of its applicability within the Federal Health Architecture (FHA) plan for a nationwide, interoperable health information infrastructure."

"Results: A variety of web-based assessment tools are available for consumers to be able to identify reliable health websites; however, many may be too difficult for the layperson to use or understand. Existing search technologies are increasingly powerful, although the expanding volume of information on the internet suggests the need for better mediated searching. Search engines provide consumers a means for quickly bypassing information that appears too technical for their individual knowledge level, and at times, searchers often overlook critical information most relevant to their needs. Overall, existing search technologies need to be more interactive, visible, and context-driven, and supported by better technology assessment methodologies, scalability of information, and enhanced access by underserved subgroups."

Better Health Search

Wall Street Journal Examines Availability, Ease Of Health Information Through New Search Engines, Medical News Today (Mar 23) -- Searching for authoritative health information can be problematic, but there are signs that new engines are delivering more relevant information.

"However, a new generation of tailored search engines seeks to address some of the issues by using different searching methods to limit the number of pages they search and taking consumers directly to the relevant information. In addition, some of the sites organize results into different categories to improve searching efficiency."

The new Kosmix.com and WebMD were two services mentioned. Other companies that are developing health search include Google, Healthline Networks, Mamma.com, and MedStory.

Kosmix Health

Kosmix Adds Two New Verticals: Travel and Politics by Gary Price, ResourceShelf (Feb 24) -- excellent review of the Kosmix Heath Search . Also recommends ClusterMed from Vivisimo.

Evaluating Health Information

Evaluating Internet Health Information: A Tutorial from the National Library of Medicine -- "This tutorial teaches you how to to evaluate the health information that you find on the Web. It is about 16 minutes long."

Healthline at Info.com

Info.com Adds Health Vertical Search to Its Search Platform; Healthline Partnership Enriches Info.com Medical Content in Response to In-Depth Queries, Marketwatch (Feb 28)

Meta-search engine, Info.com adds Health to its search verticals through an agreement with Healthline.

"Through its partnership with Healthline, Info.com now offers information seekers access to Healthline's proprietary process for crawling indexing and ranking over 170,000 health and medical sites representing 130 million pages of content across the Internet. To present this information in medically accurate context, Healthline has developed the largest consumer health taxonomy of its kind, featuring an information classification system that delivers precise, relevant open Web results, related physician-reviewed articles and HealthMaps(R) -- Healthline's unique visual navigation tools -- to optimize the search experience for individuals seeking healthcare information."

MESH Headings

Medical subject headings (MeSH) used by the U.S. National Library of Medicine for Medline are well described in this online educational video - Branching Out: The MeSH® Vocabulary. Learn about the structure of the headings, how medical literature is indexed, and how to search PubMed using the terms. Length - about 12 minutes.

Mentioned in ResourceShelf.

WebMD & eMedicine

WebMD Announces Acquisition of eMedicine.com, Inc., EContent (Jan 24)

"The acquisition of eMedicine.com is intended to enhance WebMD's ability to deliver diversified promotional and educational programs on behalf of pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, which the company reports spend more than $8 billion annually for promotional and educational programs for physicians and healthcare professionals."

Evaluating Healthline

Rita Vine shows the steps and thought process in conducting a thorough evaluation of a new search tool, in this case Healthline, a new health web search engine. The Challenge of Evaluating Health Search Tools, Sitelines (Oct 27)

There is background to this story which you can pick up in her posting. It began with the first review in Sitelines that found the content at Healthline comes from other commercially based sources and identified some glitches in navigation. Tony Gentile, VP, Product Management at HealthLine.com, responded in his blog to explain and defend. It's a good debate and Rita has invested a lot of time to conduct such a thorough review.

There is a cost to creating sites like Healthline, and a danger to cutting corners and compromising the design to launch the product. Healthline does not have the original content it claims is part of the service online yet, and the 1,100 physician specialists it says colloborated on the project were for an earlier version of Healthline and were likely nameless then too.

This isn't to say not to use Healthline - it has useful navigational features and personalized MyHealthline for saving pages and setting up alerts - but use it advisedly, noting the shortcomings that Rita has identified. Question statements such as "Healthline is the first search engine dedicated to healthcare, and the only one built by medical specialists for you." Healthline is not the only search engine dedicated to healthcare - Health on the Net (www.hon.ch), as an example, is a "health and medical information" search engine and, according to its about page, it works closely with Swiss university hospitals and has a board of medical and informatic experts, all listed.

Hospital Wait Times in Ontario

Ontario waiting times go on-line Globe and Mail (Oct 24) - Ontarians can check access wait times for key surgical procedures at http://www.health.gov.on.ca/. " Wait times are categorized by procedure, hospital and local health network."

Healthline Beta

A New Line on Healthcare News by Tara Breton, Newsbreaks (Oct 24) - Finds that Healthline (previously YourDoctor.com) is a web search engine for health content using "specialized medical taxonomy to crawl, index, and then rank Web pages." It's a consumer health site (rather than professional) that still needs some polishing. More content will be added over the next few months.

See earlier comments by Chris Sherman and by Rita Vine about this engine.

Healthline

Curing Medical Information Disorder by Chris Sherman, SearchDay (Oct 17) - recommends Healthline - "a specialized medical search engine that offers high-quality, authoritative information that's easy to find, even if you don't speak medicalese."

Site offers a short tour of the main features. Among the best is the taxonomy that supports broadening and narrowing queries as well as browsing health channels. There are also many self-assessment tools. People who take advantage of the free registration can set up news alerts and talk with other members.

Rita Vine, whose expertise is in quality health resources, examined Healthline and found that it "offers little to rival the best quality ad-and-sponsorship-free medical content on the web through sites like Medline Plus. Healthline relies principally on content from popular pre-existing 3rd party .com sources that could be obtained from any commercial search engine." See her full posting -- Scratching Under the Surface of a "New" Health Search Engine (Oct 18)

Doctors, Blogs, Search, and Google

Doctors are Blogging on Medical Searching by Rita Vine, Sitelines (June 22) - Mentions two weblogs done by doctors and picks up on some of their postings concerning search. (The California Medicine Man and Kevin MD Blog. Google, it appears is not only used by patients - doctors like it too. Rita warns about the incompleteness of the PubMed content in Google and posted comments to one of the blogs. The thread there is interesting too, especially for its link to UBC Google Scholar Blog by another medical librarian.

New Health Searchers

Attack of the Health Portals by Brian Livingston, Datamation (June 21) - reviews three new portal sites for health saying that these "Three sites typify the new wave of health portals that are changing the way people get information about diseases, medications and treatments"

+ PatientInform.org - "joint effort of the American Cancer Society, the American Diabetes Association, and the American Heart Association." But PatientInform.org is not the starting point really. It, at present, connects only to these three health centres for research. How to Use Patient Inform

+ MammaHealth.com - claims to be "hand-picking the most relevant medical sources for credible health information and crawling deep into the content these sites provide". Really - Mamma the meta-searcher? Mainly, MammaHealth seems to be organizing the results to show a definition, about the disease, into faqs, causes, symptoms, treatment. Nicely done.

+ Answers.com - "credible job on medical topics, providing a series of articles from established reference sources." True - although there will be ads too.

Consumer Health WebWatch

Consumer Health WebWatch Rates 20 Health Information Sites Research Conducted by: Consumer Reports WebWatch and the Health Improvement Institute (June 9) -- Summary of results says that "Of the 20 sites rated, six were given the highest rating, “Excellent”; five received a “Very Good” rating; eight were given a rating of “Good;” and one site was rated “Fair.”"

We are directed to the HealthRatings.org/ website created by Consumer Reports WebWatch for detailed ratings. Good luck - site seems to be malfunctioning when viewed in IE 6 and Firefox. There is information on the methodology and the instrument, but not the detailed reports on the 20 health websites.

Since the stated purpose is to "provide consumers with a one-stop destination to help determine whether a health Web site is credible and reliable", I presume they will fix this.

Meantime, results are given in some detail in Health-data sites put to the test. Consumer Reports WebWatch rates 6 of 20 as excellent - by Kristen Gerencher, Marketwatch [subscription]

June 22 - Can now view the detailed reviews and ratings of the 20 health sites. Pages are very fancy - all done in Flash - can't just print out a report.

Googling for health

More people consult Google over health By Nigel Hawkes, Health Editor, Times Online (June 6) -- "A survey of 1,000 people found that 12 per cent turn first to Google. Fewer consult family and friends, the media or medical encyclopaedias when faced with a medical problem." Of these nearly 86% believe that what they find through Google is accurate. Of interest - 52% would see a GP first. What does other 36% do?

Public Health Tutorial

New Public Health Information and Data Tutorial Released - National Library of Medicine -- "The National Library of Medicine, in collaboration with the University of Michigan Public Health Library & Informatics Division and Partners in Information Access for the Public Health Workforce, announces the release of the Public Health Information and Data Tutorial. This online tutorial, at http://phpartners.org/tutorial/, is a new tool designed to help the public health workforce effectively locate and use health information."

Guide to Medical Literature on the Internet

Researching Medical Literature on the Internet -- 2005 Update By Gloria Miccioli, LLRX.com (May 15) - Excellent guide to medical literature starting with Medline, "National Library of Medicine's electronic index that provides bibliographic references to some 4800 American and foreign biomedical journals. " through PubMed and NLM Gateway. Article also reviews commercial web sites, libraries and non-profit organizations, journals and textbooks, and 4 medical search engines. There is also one weblog mentioned - it aggregates medical blogs (or medblogs) - Medical News Feeds.

Health ONline

New report from Pew Internet and American Life on the use of health information online -- Health Report (May 2005)

"Eight in ten internet users have looked online for information on at
least one of 16 health topics, with increased interest in diet, fitness,
drugs, health insurance, experimental treatments, and particular doctors
and hospitals. That translates to about 95 million American adults (18+)
who use the internet to find health information.

Some demographic groups showed notable interest in specific topics - 59%
of online women have read up on nutrition information online, for
example, compared with 43% of online men. Thirty-eight percent of online
parents have checked online for health insurance information, compared
with 26% of internet users who do not have children living at home.
Forty-one percent of internet users with a broadband connection at home
have looked up a particular doctor or hospital, compared with 19% of
internet users with a dial-up connection at home."

My NCBI for PubMed

New Tools for the PubMed Researcher: ResourceShelf (Feb 12) MyNCBI supports saved searches, filters and alerts for PubMed.

Healthology and iVillage

iVillage Inc. Acquires Healthology, Inc., Expanding iVillage's Online Video and Information Offerings PR Newswire via CBS Marketwatch (Jan 10) Content about health at iVillage, The Internet for Women, will likely get a boost through the newly acquired Healthology.

From the press release: "Healthology produces one of the largest libraries of original, streaming video health programs and physician-authored articles on the Internet via a network of Web sites. Currently, the library consists of over 1,200 streaming videos and over 2,000 articles and transcripts on health-related topics primarily in the Women's Health, Healthy Aging, General Health and Men's Health categories. Healthology is also a leading syndicator of health content on the Web, actively distributing its content to over 4,500 Web sites, including leading news media organizations, online consumer portals, health foundations and medical associations."

Health at MSN and Yahoo

Web Portals Beef Up Health Sections By Shankar Gupta, Media Daily News (Jan 5) MSN and Yahoo are expanding the health channels at their portals.

MSN Health and Fitness will have the Mayo Clinic's health care information site, Harvard Medical School, HealthDay, and iVillage Inc., "a leading women's health Web site".

Yahoo has health news. It promises better searching. "Yahoo!'s key focus for its beta health site is searchability, and on the beta site, the search function is prominently featured. "With this new site, you're going to see search, you're going to see more personalization, and you're going to see more integration of content and community ...".

Canadian Institute for Health Information

Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) "is an independent, pan-Canadian, not-for-profit organization working to improve the health of Canadians and the health care system by providing quality, reliable and timely health information." Has a substantial number of reports on health care topics including quick stats by topic - health conditions, health services, human resources, and spending. See http://secure.cihi.ca/cihiweb/splash.html

BIOME Grows

BIOME, the gateway to health resources as part of the Resource Discovery Network, now has 25,000 "valuated, quality Internet resources in the health and life sciences, aimed at students, researchers, academics and practitioners". You can watch for new additions through New Records.

PLoS Medicine

New medical journal made available online by Kata Kertesz, Associated Press (Oct 27) PUblic Library of Science has launched a new journal - PLoS Medicine - it is open access. There is no charge for reading the articles, but scientists will pay $1,500 to have findings peer reviewed and published.

"To bypass the need for subscriptions, the journal will charge scientists $1,500 per article to publish their findings. The articles will be peer-reviewed by other scientists, just as the more traditional medical and science journals are."

There is also PLoS Biology

National Electronic Library for Health

National Electronic Library for Health (http://www.nelh.nhs.uk) is a gateway, created by the NHS in the UK, to a large range of digital resources to aid in "knowledge-based decision making" in health and medical related questions. It includes "summaries and appraisals of the evidence". This gateway is extremely well organized with many views of the resources. Spend time with the tours to become acquainted with NeLH resources.

There is also a Hitting the Headlines feature in which the Centre for Reviews and Dissemination (CRD) at the University of York assesses "the reliability of both the journalists' reporting of health stories and the research on which they are based". See the archive for headlines examined to date.

Health and Medicine Resources

BIOME in the UK has published the 7th edition of Internet Resources for Health and Medicine - pdf document -- http://biome.ac.uk/about/publications/Health_Booklet.pdf (16 pages)

OmniMedicalSearch

OmniMedicalSearch.com is a metasearch engine for medical search engines. There are 13 engines including Healthopedia, MedlinePlus, WebMD.

Medical professionals may want to use the MedPro grouping. General users are advised in the overview, to use Basic. Search results come with "related search options" - suggestions on refining the search.

There are options to search the News only or Images. Other features include OneLook.com for dictionary lookup, an Acronym Search engine, directories to medical associations and to journals. In total there are 72 databases.

Some navigation is awkward, and the service does not help identify key words or medical terms to use. But it appears to have breadth.

Jason Morrow created this site to get away from the "snake oil salesmen" that turn up in broad search results. SofterLogic, a UK based company, developed the software program.

Searchers will want to compare it to Health on the Net Foundation.

Related article: Medical Metasearch Engine Launches EContent (July 16)

Also David vs. the Goliaths: A Specialized Metasearch Engine Makes its Debut Press Release eMediaWire (July 15, 2004)

Health Resources

Quality Health Resources on the Web - July newsletter from D.L. Cohen. (pdf) - starter set of sites. Recommends searching Find Articles for an article from Searcher magazine. Searcher is no longer carried in FindArticles.com - use eLibary at HighBeam Research.

Investors wary of WebMD

The inside financial story about WebMD - WebMD's Achilles' Heel
The Internet health concern has turned profitable, but investors remain wary about stagnant revenues at its two largest businesses. Business Week Online (April 8) -- The two biggest businesses are claims-transaction services and physician services, neither of which are growing in revenue.

Health Newsletters

Lois C. Ambash looks at Keeping Up With Health Trends Online Through E-Letters at LLRX.com (March 15) - has quite a mix of e-letters from items from the Journalist's Toolbox to Wired.

Consumer Health Search

Study Finds Problems with Access to Credible Health Information Online, Calls for More Help for Consumers URAC and Consumer WebWatch (Feb 12) -- "URAC and Consumer WebWatch (CWW), a project of Consumers Union, released a report that finds problems with access to credible health information on the Internet and makes expert recommendations for improving access to health information for consumers. " Study identified 4 problem areas for consumer access to good health information and recommended technical improvements and more education.

Setting the Public Agenda for Online Health Report PDF (24 pages) December 2003

Medical Literature

Researching Medical Literature on the Internet -- 2003 Update By Gloria Miccioli. LLRX.com (Nov 3) - comprehensive review of medical resources - written by a law librarian.