Pauline W. Chen, M.D. writes in the 1/8/2009 issue of the New York Times on web sites valued by physicians for comparing hospitals, for identifying specialists, and for gathering information on medical conditions. The article highlights DHHS’s “Hospital Compare” website which allows the user to select three hospitals (by name, proximity to their home or other criteria, and view data on treatment benchmarks, patient satisfaction and other indicators that may help in choosing where to seek treatment.
Other web sites mentioned include the Medical Library Association, for their guide to finding consumer health information, as well as the National Library of Medicine’s MEDLINE Plus.
The World Health Organization has an online exhibit celebrating its achievements in public health. The site contains a photo exhibition, public health campaigns in history, a podcast, and video about the organization’s history. It also includes a list of WHO activities celebrating the anniversary.
The Pennsylvania Health Care Quality Alliance has launched a new website that compiles outcome and quality data for all of Pennsylvania’s hospitals in a single publicly accessible location. Users of the website can look up hospital quality measures in four major clinical areas: heart attacks, heart failure, pneumonia, and prevention of hospital-acquired infections–the conditions that are typically the most common and costly for hospitals to treat. The site plans to add more clinical topics and quality measures in the future. To access the site, go to www.phcqa.org.
AIDS Ephemera has pictures of posters, buttons, and even comics used as public health materials to educate consumers on AIDS. The materials are drawn from the National Library of Medicine’s Prints & Photographs collection.
The Specialized Information Services (SIS) Division of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) has a new page of Environmental-Health links on Disaster Recovery and Environmental Health. The links include information on emergency health management, environmental cleanup and recovery and hazardous materials. Information is provided in Spanish.
Martha Kirby, Queen Lane’s Library Coordinator, has created a 3rd Year Medical Student Library Guide. This guide gives students tips on which resources to use for patient care questions, literature searches, managing citations from database searches, and residency information.
The AMA has released two important documents: its first National Health Insurer Report Card and its first ever guidelines on medical tourism. The National Health Insurer Report Card was “created to provide physicians and the public with an objective and reliable source of information on the timeliness, transparency and accuracy of claims processing by the health insurance companies that are responsible for paying medical bills.” The medical tourism guidelines is a nine point outline geared towards “patients, employers, insurers, and third-parties responsible for coordinating travel outside the U.S.”
The MERLOT Health Sciences Portal is a collection of free peer reviewed resources for educators. The portal contains animation, case studies, quizzes/tests, tutorials, and other kinds of material. Each learning resource is reviewed by at least two higher education faculty members who submit a “composite” review which is posted on MERLOT.
The University of Washington Radiology Department offers
free tutorials that can be used for teaching radiographic anatomy.
The tutorials cover basic radiographic anatomy of the skeleton, radiographic evaluation of hallux valgus, ultrasound of the shoulder, and basic knee anatomy.
The CDC has released the first interactive map which displays stroke mortality and hospitalization rates data down to the county level.
Heart disease mortality and hospital data are also available. Data can be broken down by gender and/or ethnicity. In addition to being printed and saved, two maps can be compared at the same time.
