Twitter, a popular communications platform, is identified as contributing to improved mortality and morbidity outcomes resulting from the 2013 Hattiesburg, Mississippi EF-4 Tornado. This study describes the methodology by which Twitter was investigated ...

The development toolkit is a set of resources for people developing decision aids.

Ottawa Patient Decision Aid Development eTraining (ODAT) an online, self-guided tutorial that takes people through the Ottawa patient decision aid development process.

The International Patient Decision Aid Standards (IPDAS) Collaboration established an internationally approved set of criteria to determine the quality of patient decision aids.

We lead an international group of researchers in the ongoing systematic review of patient decision aids for health-related treatment or screening decisions.

Developers can use the Decision Aid Library Inventory (DALI) system to register their decision aids. They can also download the current Complete Inventory to see what other developers are working on now and have worked on in the past.

Decisional Needs Assessment in Populations
Originally written in 1999 and updated in 2013, this workbook outlines the steps in completing an assessment of the decision making needs of a population.

Predictive analytics, or the use of electronic algorithms to forecast future events in real time, makes it possible to harness the power of big data to improve the health of patients and lower the cost of health care. However, this opportunity raises policy, ethical, and legal challenges. In this article we analyze the major challenges to implementing predictive analytics in health care settings and make broad recommendations for overcoming challenges raised in the four phases of the life cycle of a predictive analytics model: acquiring data to build the model, building and validating it, testing it in real-world settings, and disseminating and using it more broadly. For instance, we recommend that model developers implement governance structures that include patients and other stakeholders starting in the earliest phases of development. In addition, developers should be allowed to use already collected patient data without explicit consent, provided that they comply with federal regulations regarding research on human subjects and the privacy of health information.

Breast cancer screening with mammography is a highly personal health decision for women age 40 and older. There are few decision aids to help guide women about

PubMed comprises more than 23 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Citations may include links to full-text content from PubMed Central and publisher web sites.

Image via CrunchBase In my last column, I discussed the need for a better way of connecting the discrete healthcare-related problems identified by patients and physicians with solvers who might be able to develop a solution – perhaps an immediate fix, perhaps a longer-term effort. I’m grateful for the volume of feedback [...]

Reflecting on the 25th anniversaries of the invention of the World Wide Web by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and the adoption of the Convention on Rights of the Child by

Background: While there is an abundance of evidence-based practice (EBP) recommendations guiding management of various chronic diseases, evidence suggesting best practice for using social media to improve health outcomes is inadequate. The variety of social media platforms, multiple potential uses, inconsistent definitions, and paucity of rigorous studies, make it difficult to measure health outcomes reliably in chronic disease management. Most published investigations report on an earlier generation of online tools, which are not as user-centered, participatory, engaging, or collaborative, and thus may work differently for health self-management.
Objective: The challenge to establish a sound evidence base for social media use in chronic disease starts with the need to define criteria and methods to generate and evaluate evidence. The authors’ key objective is to develop a framework for research and practice that addresses this challenge.
Methods: This paper forms part of a larger research project that presents a conceptual framework of how evidence of health outcomes can be generated from social media use, allowing social media to be utilized in chronic disease management more effectively. Using mixed methods incorporating a qualitative literature review, a survey and a pilot intervention, the research closely examines the therapeutic affordances of social media, people with chronic pain (PWCP) as a subset of chronic disease management, valid outcome measurement of patient-reported (health) outcomes (PRO), the individual needs of people living with chronic disease, and finally translation of the combined results to improve evidence-based decision making about social media use in this context.
Results: Extensive review highlights various affordances of social media that may prove valuable to understanding social media’s effect on individual health outcomes. However, without standardized PRO instruments, we are unable to definitively investigate these effects. The proposed framework that we offer outlines how therapeutic affordances of social media coupled with valid and reliable PRO measurement may be used to generate evidence of improvements in health outcomes, as well as guide evidence-based decision making in the future about social media use as part of chronic disease self-management.
Conclusions: The results will (1) inform a framework for conducting research into health outcomes from social media use in chronic disease, as well as support translating the findings into evidence of improved health outcomes, and (2) inform a set of recommendations for evidence-based decision making about social media use as part of chronic disease self-management. These outcomes will fill a gap in the knowledge and resources available to individuals managing a chronic disease, their clinicians and other researchers in chronic disease and the field of medicine 2.0.