Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Blogs and Web 2.0 tools

Peter Murray will be at the 25th (Anniversary) Annual International Nursing Computer and Technology Conference, organised by the College of Nursing Center for Professional Development of Rutgers The State University of New Jersey. It will be held on 14 - 17 June 2007 at the San Francisco Marriott in San Francisco, California, USA.

He and colleagues in the hi-blogs.info 'krew' (www.hi-blogs.info) will be blogging the event - see www.differance-engine.net/rutgers2007/ and will be doing several presentations and workshops; more about that will be added here in June.

A 'first' for that blog (as far as we know), as we like to keep trying out new things. It is the first nursing/health informatics event blog to be mobile-enabled, which means that you can access the blog in specially modified format on your Internet-enabled mobile device (phone, PDA, etc). I have tried it out and it certainly works on my MDA using T-Mobile's 'web'n'walk' (which is not an advert).

Another new tool - Peter is exploring Protopage (www.protopage.com) and similar start page technologies for his online CV/personal website. It has a lot of features similar to other applications such as NetVibes abd Pageflakes.
See www.protopage.com/peterjmurray for yet another 'always in beta' project.

OSHCA2007 presentations

The presentation materials from the OSHCA 2007 event (see earlier post of May 8) are now available on the OSHCA website at www.oshca.org/conference/OSHCA2007/presentations/

Thanks to Ignacio Valdes at Linux Medical News (www.linuxmednews.com) for noting this.

EFMI Special Topic Conference, Croatia

CHIRAD members Graham Wright and Helen Betts are this week at the EFMI (www.efmi.org) 2007 STC Special Topic Conference on the Brijuni Islands, Croatia (www.hdmi.hr/stc2007/). No reports as yet, but hopefully a post hoc report can be posted.

Monday, May 14, 2007

South Africa teaching

This week (14-18 May), CHIRAD members Graham Wright and John Bryant are in Mthatha, South Africa (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mthatha) teaching on the MSc in Health Informatics (see www.chirad.org.uk/mthatha.htm and www.wsu.ac.za/news/informatics.htm).

On 15 and 16 May, we will be trying some interesting joint teaching between the students in South Africa and those on the current cohorts in Winchester. More reports on this over the next few days.

So much for patient choice ...

According to a report in today's Guardian (>>>), "Labour's health policy giving people the right to choose between NHS hospitals in England is regarded by most patients as irrelevant, the government's health watchdog will disclose this week."

This is hardly a surprise to the many who have been saying for years that the sort of choice being offered as part of the policy is of little or no direct relevance to most patients.

The report goes to say that the issues people regard as most important are whether they have confidence in a hospital's doctors and nurses, and issues they regarded as least important included whether they have a choice of hospital.

The report concludes by quoting the Royal College of Nursing's general secretary, Peter Carter, that: "Asking people if they want more choice is like asking whether they want more peace. Of course they will say 'yes'."

Tuesday, May 08, 2007

OSHCA 2007 confererence

The OSCHCA (Open Source Health Care Alliance) conference takes places May 8-11 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. We would love to be there, as many CHIRAD members are involved in free/libre and open source software and approaches in health and health informatics.

Information on OSHCA and the event are at www.oshca.org. We look forward to some reports and will post any information we find.

JISC Web 2.0 webinar

Last week, Peter Murray took part on a week-long' webinar' dealing with Web 2.0 applications in higher education in the UK. His blog posts from the week are available on the Informaticopia blog. It was an interesting experience - daily hour-long presentations using a mix of audio, video, slide presentations and text-chat, interlinked with Moodle discussion fora.

For anyone interested in the outputs, or the process, the slides are available at Slideshare >>>, thanks to mark van Harmelen, one of the organisers of the event. The Moodle discussions can be found at moodle.cs.man.ac.uk/web2/ and you can still register as a guest.

Some interesting ideas were raised around the use of Web 2.0 in education, including how institutions might use external services and the issues involved. CHIRAD will be using Moodle and a variety of online tools, including Web 2.0 applications, for teaching; we will post here about our experiences.

Thursday, May 03, 2007

Birthdays and things

This blog - as with all good blogs - will cover the personal as well as the professional. So, we note that May 3 is a big day in CHIRAD terms - and especially this year.

Happy birthday to Graham Wright, Founder and Director of CHIRAD, who is the big SIX-OH today. In addition, CHIRAD members Peter Murray and Rod Ward celebrate their wedding anniversaries today - not to each other, but curiously they were both married on the same day back in 1986.

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Podcasting at AMIA

AMIA, the American Medical Informatics Association (www.amia.org) has been developing podcasts; they are available for download through the AMIA website. What caught our attention was a new podcast from their 'Knowledge in Motion' Working Group, on 'IT and Patient Empowerment' (on www.amia.org/mbrcenter/wg/kim/documents.asp).
Most of the other podcasts, available at www.amia.org/podcasts/index.asp, are from their pharmacoinformatics working group.

Our reason for mentioning these is that CHIRAD members who have an interest in podcasting will be participating in some conference presentations later this year; watch out here for more details.

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Wednesday, May 02, 2007

CHIRAD's 'Big Issues' papers

CHIRAD has launched a series of occasional papers on topics that face health informatics professionals, especially in the field of semantic interoperability. The first paper, on SNOMED CT can be found on the 'Big Issues' pages (www.chirad.org.uk/big_issues.htm).

Titled 'Implementing Snomed CT within national electronic record solutions', the paper explores a variety of issues and poses a series of questions to be addressed.

Each paper will have a linked discussion forum, which will be moderated by academics from CHIRAD.

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Tuesday, May 01, 2007

Welcome to the new CHIRAD blog

Welcome to the new CHIRAD blog. It aims to complement CHIRAD's other online resources and activities. We will be posting updates and comments on CHIRAD activities here, so you may wish to simply subscribe to the RSS feed here, rather than have to keep checking all our other resources.

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