Everyone, including patients, doctors, nurses and other health professionals and app developers, is invited to submit new ideas of health apps and online maps they think would be useful.

For the next six weeks, people can visit maps and apps and suggest favourite apps, ideas for apps or health maps they would like to see, as well as vote for their favourite ideas submitted by others.

In the video below Dr Shaibal Roy explains more about apps and how you can get involved.

The call for ideas, suggestions and votes for apps or health maps come under one of these five themes:

• Personalisation and choice of care and support: for example, an app that allows a user to search for health information online
• Better health and care outcomes: for example, an app that allows a patient to manage their health condition
• Autonomy and accountability: for example, an app that allows patients to publicly rate and review their local health services
• Improving public health: for example, an app that tracks an individual’s levels of exercise
• Improving long-term care and support: for example, an app that helps with planning long-term care and support

Examples of existing apps that benefits patients include:

• Choosing Well app from NHS Yorkshire and Humber, gives addresses of the nearest NHS services
• Paediatric Emergency Drugs app developed by Evelina Children’s Hospital helps calculate correct medicine dosage;
• iBreastCheck, Breakthrough Breast Cancer – gives information about checking breasts for abnormalities;
• MicroGuide, NHS Southampton – gives practical support to clinicians when treating patients with infections;

The animation is the result of collaboration beween University of Ottawa Centre for e-Learning and Bellanet to create a series of e-Learning modules designed to strengthen knowledge sharing within networks, organizations, and individuals. Find out more at http://www.saea.uottawa.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=682&Itemid=649

Watch in pop-out window driven by Apture.

So what is it?

Google Wave is a real-time communication platform that ties together the best features of existing communication and collaboration tools within a browser interface. These include email, instant messaging, wikis, web chat, social networking, and project management all in one place.

It offers users access to almost any iGoogle or OpenSocial gadget.

Google Wave also provides powerful extension capabilities through the use of  Robots which modify information, interact with users and pull information from outside sources. Existing robots provide spell checking, link writing and in-line search functions.

As with many existing Google apps Google Wave offers embedding tools that enable users to integrate their waves into a third party website or blog.

Want a preview?

Watch the demo video below from Google’s IO conference, May 27 – 28 2009, San Francisco.

I have adapted Robin’s map adding in a few more tools and changing the functional grouping. You can view it in the window below.

Alternatively you can download the mindmap in a variety of formats:

• Portable document format (3.8 MB)
• PNG format (256 KB)

The ‘Don’t Worry…..Take Action!’ campaign is designed to focus on this ineffective behaviour and change it to a positive outcome. Find out more at www.nationalstressawarenessday.co.uk.

Patient Opinion is a not-for-profit social enterprise web site which encourages patients to share their experience of their treatment in the NHS.

According to James Munro of Patient Opinion, the resulting melange aims “To make it easier both for patients and staff to access all the feedback about their local services, and to increase the chance that public feedback will generate real improvements in services“

This work from the Patient Opinion lab follows the work of the Cabinet Office led Power of Information (POI) taskforce which is opening up more public sector information as part of its implementation of the Power of Information Review. Read more about this on the POI blog.

Here at Surepoint we are doffing our caps to the Patient Opinion team and are looking to follow in their innovative footsteps.

Watch this space for news on work underway to bring in data about local mental health services from the NHS Choices website into the Choice and medication website we have developed. Our aim is to ensure that when people using mental health services and their carers have found information about prescribed psychiatric medication on the Choice and medication website they can also find out information about local mental health services without having to look somewhere else.

Lee asks “Are we in danger of focusing too much on the supply side and not enough on the real world problems that demand innovative solutions?”. Lee summarises some of the most visible parts of the innovation initiative iceberg and justifiably leads us towards an affirmative response to this question. Rightly so given the size of that iceberg!

Lee says “I would put my money on somebody with a burning problem and a passion to solve it rather than a well-meaning group who want to help every single time. Me too. I think it is the burning and the passion that matter most. Innovation comes from motivation. I call this motinnovation.

Given this hypothesis, the most interesting question that Lee poses is “How might we harness user-led innovation?”. In fact, Lee undersells just how much he and his colleagues at Headshift have done in developing easy to use environments that enable people to connect with each other to share and learn about what works and also what doesn’t.

Having said I think that innovation comes from motivation the question I want to explore is, “What are the optimum environmental conditions for maximum motinnovation amongst groups?”

There’s a whole host of cultural, legal, managerial and technical issues which can affect these environmental conditions. More than I have time or space for here! Of all the techniques which can be used to facilitate motinnovation amongst groups by far the most important is building trust.

Without trust people are unwilling to participate and cooperate with one another and innovation suffers. However, building trust is not a linear progression to a magic place. Building trust is cyclical and involves iterative development. Providing opportunities for people to take small steps together is a great start. The barcamp-style gatherings that Lee mentions sound just about right. Fertile breeding grounds for mixing collective passions. In my opinion it is the collective experience of taking small steps together which forms the motivational basis for more ambitious collaboration and ultimately innovation. Some have responded saying, “You should get down to the bar more often!”

The author asserts that:

While searching is still the No.1 use of the Internet in health care, social media are growing in importance as consumers’ preferred online channels for health knowledge… Within Internet social media, the most popular health site is Wikipedia, which is used by about one in five adults, followed by online forums, social networks (such as MySpace, Facebook and Second Life), video-sharing, blogs and live chat rooms.

The author cites findings from the 2006 Edelman Trust Barometer which identified the steady decline of trust in traditional figures of authority, and the increase in the credibility of the “average person.” This trend coincide with the growth and increasing credibility of Internet communications that enabled access to peer opinions.

The author suggests that people go online for health-social networking:

• to see what other people using medication or receiving treatment have to say about their experiences
• to learn skills or get education that helps them manage a health condition

This certainly resonates with my own and my families experiences of seeking out information about issues affecting our health. Talking of which I’m just about to check out wikipedia to find sources of information about suggested treatments for my current ear infection!

Types of blogging applications

There are many free blogging applications – some are web-hosted solutions like [blogger] others are client based solutions like [MarsEdit] or [Ecto]. I use the latter as it enables me to read from and draft posts to many blog locations offline, for instance when I am travelling. In fact I wrote this post using Ecto on the train and now I am back online I can send it direct to confluence without actually going to confluence.

How does it work?

Confluence makes use of the [Blogging RPC Plugin] which implements the Blogger 1.0 [Application Programming Interface] (API) and the MetaWeblog API for Confluence. This let you post Confluence news pages from any client that implements these APIs.

How can I set up my blogging client?

There are instructions for various blog clients, including:

• [MarsEdit]
• [Ecto]
• [w.bloggar]

Are there any pitfalls?

Yes you need to use write your post in standard wiki-markup, it will all be translated normally when posted, including macros. Note, however, that your blog client will not be able to interpret the markup and will present it as plain text.