Posted by meramd
Sun, 20 Apr 2008 01:45:00 GMT
In a recently published report from hitwise there is data on what people search for online. Quite a few people may be surprised by this, but health search tops the list in the category of searches. Nearly half the searches online are health related!
Though this data may be biased towards internet behaviour in US, we think that results in India or any other country are likely to be similar.
The complete report is available here.
Posted in Miscellaneous | Tags data, health, online, Search | 3 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by meramd
Mon, 14 Apr 2008 00:32:00 GMT
There have been 3 special reports on Indian healthcare in The Times of India, Delhi edition, April 13, 2008. These are
1. Reduction of people wanting to get into this profession - Down from 233591 applications in 2006 to 161000 in 2008.
2. Doctors sick of the "torture" by the system
3. Shortage of specialists - just 6 doctors for 10000 people, in some regions like Chattisgarh the reported number is 2 per 100000 people!
All the reports are thought provoking and its time for action. So how do we solve the problem?
The report has suggestions for establishing more institutes of higher medical education and recognizing the medical degrees from other countries. But given that a senior resident at AIIMS gets a stipend that is much lower than the starting salaries of most IT graduates, we will need to attack the issue of doctor pay as well.
What are the other things that we can do?
1. Information Dissemination - ITC's eChoupal has been a success story.. the same platform that provides information about crops, seeds, weather and prices can also give information about diseases and conditions and medicines. This information will be needed to be provided in local languages.
MeraMD.com has a health search that can provide information from reliable sources, but we currently do not have local language support. Using the information obtained from world trusted sources doctor and medical associations, these translations can be done.
2. Telemedicine - We had talked to a number of specialists about telemedicine, but none were convinced about its efficacy as a diagnostic tool. Even if the doctors liked the idea, they were concerned about legal implications for the same. But there is no denying that telemedicine does make sense. It saves people from unnecessary travel and stay costs in many cases, where people from rural areas have to visit larger cities/towns for treatment. Much of this treatment can be diagnosed and administered remotely. 3. Mobile health centers - This requires more strain on the already tattering infrastructure. Doctors would have to visit the rural areas on a predefined schedule. The Indian government has tried to force doctors to be stationed in villages. We think that scheduled visits by mobile health centers may be better.
So what are the issues in the above solutions and why aren’t people already doing this? (Even if this is getting done, why is it not scaling?)
We think that the issues are:
1. Legal: Despite all disclaimers, it is dangerous to give medical information as it can be wrongly used, and can lead to litigation. Even in case of telemedicine, most doctors do not want to give any advice remotely. They are mainly worried about the responsibility factor.
2. Financial Viability: There will be long payback periods for telemedicine equipment. It will be difficult to implement any such program without support from government, hospitals and pharma companies.
So what can be done?
- Government needs to support initiatives like providing medical information to people both financially and legally.
- meraMD.com can ensure that the information is provided in local languages and for maintenance and searchability of the same. i.e. we can provide the back office and technical support.
Posted in Miscellaneous | Tags doctor, echoupal, healthcare, indian, shortage, telemedicine | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by meramd
Tue, 15 Jan 2008 05:41:00 GMT
Here is a summary report on bird flu outbreak in India.
Where:
Birbhum and South Dinajpur districts, West Bengal, India.
What:
Confirmed by Bhopal-based High Security Animal Disease Laboratory (HSADL) to be the H5N1 strain. Reports of over 35000 birds dying in last 10 days
When:
Confirmed on January 15 by the authorities
Risks:
The virus causes a type of influenza in birds that is highly contagious among them and can be deadly. It does not usually infect people unless they come in close contact with infected birds or contaminated surfaces.
Government Action Plan:
precautionary measures, including the culling of poultry
60 rapid response teams sent to the state
36,000 Tamiflu tablets have been despatched to West Bengal
5000 protection masks sent to the state
Top officials of the National Institute of Communicable Diseases (NICD) and the department of animal husbandry had on Monday rushed the affected area.
Posted in Miscellaneous | Tags bird, flu, India | no comments
Posted by meramd
Sat, 22 Dec 2007 05:36:00 GMT
Popular medical beliefs have been reported as myths by this article at BBC news. Of course, this may not be the last word on these.. but here is the summary of the seven "myths". Read the article for more details.
| | Drink at least eight glasses of water a day We use only 10% of our brains Hair and fingernails continue to grow after death Reading in dim light ruins your eyesight Shaving causes hair to grow back faster or coarser Mobile phones are dangerous in hospitals Eating turkey makes people especially drowsy |
Posted in Miscellaneous | Tags medical, myths, seven | no comments
Posted by meramd
Thu, 25 Oct 2007 07:16:00 GMT
Here is a link on how to search for good medical information on the web:
http://www.acponline.org/hospitalist/oct07/medical_websites.htm
This webpage is from the site of American College of Physicians. It has tips on how to go about searching for medical infomation and some links to popular medical sites that you can trust for general medical infomation, specific medical information and also for continuing medical education. We hope you find the above link useful. MeraMD team already has these sites in the search database. So the easiest thing for you, is to leave all the hard work of searching trusted medical sites to us, and go ahead and use our custom health search engine here. The search is powered by Google, and you can rely on Google's excellent search rank algorithm to give you the results, while you have peace of mind about the reliability of the search results.
Posted in Miscellaneous | Tags find, information, medical | no comments
