October 24, 2012

The ultimate Google+ widget for microblogs - help needed!

Ok this is a medical blog, so what is this discussion doing here you will ask? Well - many visitors here are (medical) bloggers and this is a very practical scenario that needs to be solved. So I'm asking the blogger community for advice, stay tuned and you'll learn some!

So you have a blog and you are using social media also for microblogging - ultrashort comments for quick interactions with your community, "Twitter" style. You want these microblogs to appear on the side bar of your blog - we have all seen the Twitter widget streaming recent tweets. Great for the small stuff that you don't feel like making a lengthy blog about but still want to share with your followers.

Well Twitter is all great but being minimalistic I want everything under the same roof and for me that's Google. I prefer using Google+ for microblogs because of convenience - no extra login or external website to browse to as everything is easily done from the Gmail interface or via my Android. Besides, Twitter is limited to a frustrating few 140 characters and Google+ provides for an excellent platform for professional networking and communications. Twitter is lacking for me.

So a Google+ widget is needed to display these microblogs. That's where the issues start, let me explain.

Google+ is based on Circles which are primarily thought as a layer of privacy. You can post something privately to your colleagues through a "Doctors' only" Circle so that your other friends and family members don't read that. It's tempting to think of Circles as a "channel" or "group" feature - a little like #hashtags are used to categorize posts - but first and foremost it is for privacy. Thus, your Circled posts are not open to the Internet as Public posts are and there is and will never be any RSS stream from these, it would simply defy the function of Circles.

A hack might be to use email forwarding; add an email to the doctors only Circle so that the post is forwarded to some service which adds it to a stream. Sounds good but the details are fuzzy - I will have to work on this. IFTTT might be the platform providing this.

So why not just post Public all the time and stream that to a widget? Well that's no good either - my blog followers would never want to read my non-medical posts. And vice versa - posting Public all the time on Google+ would drown my other followers in topics they are not interested in. Public posts using #hashtags seems like a nice intermediary solution but again I would be overflowing my followers as a whole and there is no way to make a stream from hashtags in Google+.

So I started a Google+ Page as a social-backend for my blog. All posts there are public and thus easily streamed to a widget. There are two major drawbacks with this way;
1) Notifications on Google+ Pages cannot be forwarded to my personal Google+ or email. I'm too lazy to login to Page just to check for notifications. I like to follow up posts through comments and it's too cumbersome from a seperate Page. Remember a Page is designed to be managed by one or more individuals.
2) How do I choose if I should post a microblog with my personal Google+ profile or the blogs' Page? My 'librarian oriented' brain cannot have my posts disseminated all over in an unsystematic way!

Best of all thus would be if I could post on my personal profile and these then were forwared to the Google+ Page as a public post from where it is then displayed on the gadget. Again I'm looking into the email forwarding possibility but it seems to me there are no options currently available.

So a call out to 'bloggers united' - do you have any suggestions?

October 23, 2012

Trying to grab that text? Use OCR!

Every now and then you will encounter situations where you can't use the copy & paste technique. Indispencible in the hospital to quickly write consultation texts, letters etc. - nothing is more frustrating as when the medical record system (in an hilarious attempt to stop data theft) cripples the copy/paste function.

Other scenarious where you might need to quickly get some text in electronic format is that when you get a medical letter from a foreign patient. It has happened to me a several times and once in the middle of the night where the patient had acute dyspnea.

Here is what you need to do to do online OCR, "Optical Character Recognition"

1. Convert the text to image

If the text is on your computer you can use any screen grab app to just capture a screen image while having the text open. A favorite of mine is Lightscreen, a portable app thus allowing you to install on USB drive or within your local folder without administration rights.

Text on paper needs to be scanned of course - easily done in modern offices. Make sure the new image is in high quality, PNG is a lossless (no pixels lost while compressing) format highly recommended.

2. Remove patient identifying information

As we are going to use an online application we need to delete any information that might identify the patient. Not that I distrust the website used, just a good habit "just in case".
Open www.pixlr.com - a free, online Photoshop mimic where you can easily manipulate your new image. Just remember to save it back to PNG format agin.

3. Convert to text

So here's the magic ingredient in the cake; www.onlineocr.net is an online tool which takes an image and converts all text it can find to electronic format. Why this one stands out from the other lots out there is that you can even select which language to use! Now that wasn't so difficult!

And now you can do what you want with your text. If you're translating a medical letter just take it to Google translate.

July 1, 2012

Signs and syndromes in the emergency department

You remember the ad "you can't beat the feeling"? What they didn't know is that there actually is one thing that does beat the feeling of a fresh Cola can - eliciting a sign you've learned in medical school, glued to your cortex years ago and finally making sense! Just like fresh blood on a CT can't lie about subarachnoid hemorrhage, a positive sign can verify a diagnosis you're having in mind. And that is indeed a feeling of excitement and victory. Even drugged Dr House can't hide his wide nostrils of joy as he's hit the nail on the head.

Therefore I decided to learn more signs and even syndromes I might encounter in my emergency department. And it has already made wonders - recently I learned about Rovsing sign and what do you know - next patient coming in with ambulance was a comatose elderly man having fluctuating, horizontal eye movements caused by uremia, a positive Rovsing sign... HOWZAT!

But that's what wise masters have been telling us all the time, doctors or not - what you go looking for, you will find. It's an universal law - and a Russian proverb!.

So I decided to make a list of signs and syndromes I could expect to encounter in my emergency department. In the spirit of social media I want to share this list with you, in hope that it will also increase your skills of diagnosis and pattern recognition. As most of my notes in Google Docs (now Drive) the list is a dynamic one which I am constantly editing to make better. Please feel free to use the comments for feedback or additions if you have some favorite sign or syndrome that has helped you in the ED.

Signs and syndromes in emergency medicine

To complement this list I also have a special collection in my Picasa web album where I collect medical images representing signs or diagnostic clues in the same manner as a picture says 1000 words.

In case you are interesting in more of these there are even more detailed lists on the Internet although I find many of the entries there not so relevant to the ED;

http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/disease
http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/syndrome

Finally, credit must be given to some sources I have used extensively to make the list;

Wikipedia
Whonamedit.com
fpnotebook.com
gpnotebook.com
and others who I haven’t been able to identify (just old notes from med-school)

May 19, 2012

Social media for doctors - where the brains meet

This post has been moved to here...

May 15, 2012

Why Google+ is better than Facebook as a professional social media platform

So many social media platforms, so many decisions...

From the battle of social media platforms have come three giants we all know; Twitter, Facebook and Google+, all very likely to stay for a while. Twitter, restricting posts to 140 characters, has a different approach and has turned out to be an excellent medium to discover new, interesting information. It's also good for making new contacts but minimal profile information and communication features makes it limited for anything more than that. And thus it isn't even considered to be a competitor to the other two giants, Facebook and Google+.

Many have said that Google+ is nice but it isn't making the expected impact and I see most my colleagues ignoring Google+ because it lacks the critical mass of users to have any power. I think this is a pity since Google+ has some powerful tools and features and in my opinion is a much better network for professional networking, unlike Facebook which still today has reminders of it's roots in a network for college students. As I learn more about Google+ I find my self leaning more and more towards it and actually stepping away from Facebook as it is becoming just too much nonsense. Let me explain why.

Google+ enters the scene and breaks records

Facebook has been around for years while Google+ is the new kid on the block but it has Google's enormous back-end with complimentary IT tools- and services not to be undermined. Integrated with Gmail, Picasa and Google Docs (now Google Drive) amongst others it is so much more than just another social media platform and has many tools to be more than an entertainment platform. This along with excitement, as people were eager to see Google's implementation of a social media network, made Google+ welcomed as it was launched in July 2011. Records were broken in just a few days as users flocked in to try it out but the sunshine story faded as most users didn't return. What else was there to expect, it was like coming to a banquet full of food but with only a few attending. Google+ newbies got lonely.

Facebook is not a professional playground

Facebook was started as an online network for college students. Nobody could have foreseen the tremendous growth Facebook was to go through in the coming years but this growth spurt has also turned out to be Facebook's Achilles heel. As a network for college students, privacy was never an issue - the kids wanted to see their classmates doing heroic or stupid things and seeing someone dead drunk in a bush on the schoolyard was simply cool. Posts were open to everyone and as Facebook opened to the rest of the world this non-privacy approach lived on until new users started crying out, asking for fixes. Major issues were plastered and privacy settings introduced but too complicated for users to grasp. Still today, the average user has no idea how much of his or her posts are visible to other contacts or even rest of the world through the search engines. The fact remains; on Facebook, you mostly read everything from everyone. Not only is it a privacy concern but also you are easily overwhelmed by useless information like 'Joe just ate a meatball yesterday' and 'Jane Liked it'. A little like a kids playground if you ask me.

Google's approach: Circles

This is not the kind of media I want as my professional platform (nor for private purposes!) and Google was smart as they recognized the problem and came up with a solution: Circles. For each friend (contact) you add on your Google+ account, you define what circles your friend should belong to. A little extra work compared to Facebook's way of just adding a friend, but this way yields a high ROI (return of investment) as you, through your Circles, define not only who can read your posts but also what you want to read on your wall (called Stream in Google+). So when I want feedback from my emergency medicine colleagues I will post that post only to that circle and if it's personal family photos my colleagues will not have to read that. It is very important you understand this is not only a major leap for privacy but also a way to have your wall fed only with what you are interested in, you will not read about your friends Like-ing the meatballs somebody else ate.

To Facebook's defence, they have actually added the 'Lists' feature to try to achieve the same results and even a mute button for individuals - but these were introduced too late. Nobody has time or energy to go through their hundreds of contacts and group each and everyone to a list. Google+ does this right from the beginning and even does it with an intuitive and graphical drag 'n drop interface to make the task of circling friends an easy one to do, almost fun even.

Hashtags for discovery

Social media is a great tool for discovering new content, you can do that either by watching posts from your contacts or follow a particular channel. The hashtag (#) is a simple technology for the latter; using #emergencymedicine as a search pattern on Twitter or Google+ will show you in real-time what people or posting, relating one way or the other to emergency medicine.
Notice 'Sparks' on the top for easily selecting your channel

Notice 'Sparks' on the top for easily selecting your channel

You can also save hashtag searches (Google+ calles these Sparks) for fast access later (your saved searches also affect what is displayed on your main Steam ('wall'). This is yet another feature to minimize the clutter you are confronted with on your wall (said a little rougher; cut the bullshit) as you can easily select what 'channel' you want to read from. So when I don't feel in the mood to be fed with random clutter I click the Emergency Medicine Doctors and read only posts from these. Or I click #Linux and read only what's going on in the Linux world. It's a feature you will love once you've met!

Facebook lacks this feature and actually returns a rather awkward, cluttered list of search results if you search 'emergency medicine' without the hashtag. Google+ returns a more intuitive list of results and even attempts to prioritize them to fit your interests.

Google Hangouts for easy video-conferences

In 2011 a few lucky ones got to speak directly with Barack Obama using Google+ Hangout

Many have tried to provide for a decent interface for video-conferencing and most have failed, succumbed to technical challenges or just lack of users (in todays competitive climate you literally have to give gold to attract users). With Google+ the Hangout was introduced as a easy and quick way to start a video conversation with up to 10 users simultaneously. This is a tool companies would have paid thousands of dollars for only few years ago and is now available for free.
Add to this how easy it is to discover and contact interesting people on Google+ and you should realize the potential. Online discussion panels or debates about hot topics in emergency medicine... and you can participate from your living room - how awesome is that!

Other small stuff I like about Google+

Google+ integrates very nicely with the mothership, Google's search engine, for smooth and easy publicity of your posts on the Internet (if you wish so). Defining posts as public or confined only to your selected circles is very intuitive and hard to do wrong. Facebook has had years of criticism for this as the settings were introduced late and are cumbersome to use.
Your posts can not only be deleted if you regret but also edited, something that Facebook amazingly doesn't allow.
Google+ is tightly integrated with Picasa, Google's excellent photo & album manager. With Google+ you can instantly edit and arrange your photos stored on Picasa and those you add through Google+ are instantly accessible through Picasa. With the Android app (I don't know about the iOS or Win versions, anyone?) you can ask for all photos to be automatically uploaded to your Google+/Picasa account, sparing you the hassle of plugging the phone to a computer to get your photos.
On Google+ you don't get the feeling that you are a puppet being used to create treasure for money makers in the market. Advertising is minimal and I don't expect Google+ to disgust me with the idea of asking for money for prioritized status updates as Facebook has just introduced.
Finally, this is what had me come back repeatedly to Google+ for good laughs and inspirations: animated GIFs. Just try the #GIF channel for yourself, be warned - you are going to have a hard time stepping away from your computer!

Priceless Electrical Activity