Welcome dear friends to the 37th edition of Medicine 2.0 blog carnival that focuses on the integration of web 2.0 with our current practice of medicine. We are thrilled to be hosting such a great blog carnival and would like to express our gratitude to Berci for this opportunity.

If you are a first time visitor of the Health Blogs Observatory, please be free to explore our site, submit your blog to our directory, or even contribute to our research.

This edition is special to us not only because it is our first time as hosts, but also because both founders of the Health Blogs Observatory are at this very moment at the actual carnival. Each February for the last 26 years one of the biggest carnivals in the world is held in Rijeka, Croatia. The main event of Rijeka’s Carnival is The International Carnival Parade which takes place in the city center today at 12 am, Central European Time (UTC+1). The great thing is that you can watch the live webcast of the parade, and maybe even see us. We will be dressed as the ambulance crew

And now, without further delay, here are the great articles which compose another unforgettable edition of the Medicine 2.0 Blog Carnival.

Personal Health Record (PHR)

David O’Reilly @IntelliMedBlog conducted a poll on LinkedIn to find out what people think the use and control of personal health information will look like ten years from now. You can see the screen shot of the actual pool on the left, but to find out the results please visit the Intelligent Medicine Blog.

@JohnSharp has informed us at his eHealth Blog about the speach Roni Zeiger of Google Health gave at the Towards an Electronic Patient Record conference. He has predicted that the adoption of PHRs will follow the path of online banking, from early suspicion to general acceptance.

When we talk about PHRs, there is no escaping Google, who is the major player in this area. @DanaBlankenhorn questions if Google Health is evil and corrupt as some are trying to make it appear.

It’s Twitter time

Michelle Kraft @krafty is wondering how to use Twitter within medical libraries or health care. At her blog, The Krafty Librarian, she draws inspiration from the 140 Health Care Uses for Twitter by Phil Baumann.

When Naimul Huq @naimul first heard of Twitter he thought it was a waste of time. Well he certainly doesn’t feel the same way now. Find out why at Crumple it up Blog.

Dawson, the creator of the Medical Student Blog @medicalstudent, brought PubMed to Twitter. He created an application which literally lets you search for PubMed articles using Twitter.

If all this talk about Twitter made you want to, well, Twitter. Check out the list of health and medical twitterers from David Bradley @ sciencebase.

Research

People from the International Council on Medical & Care Compunetic @icmccupdate have informed us of an interesting analysis of hospitals that use Web2.0 services to connect with consumers.

Here at the Health Blogs Observatory @HBObservatory we have written about the scientific paper by librarian Laura Cobus in which she describes her success in implementing blogs and wikis in a graduate public health course.

Gobbledygook is a blog on scientific publishing in the internet age written by Martin Fenner @mfenner. Recently he conducted an interview with Moshe Pritsker, the CEO, Editor-in-Chief and co-founder of the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE), a peer-reviewed, free access, online journal devoted to the publication of biological research in a video format.

Clinical Librarian Shamsha Damani @shamsha has notified us about the new initiative from the BMJ Publishing Group which should make Evidence Based Medicine easy to swallow.

Web sites, tools, services….

Opening shop

VirologyWiki – wiki about viruses and viral disease
PeRSSonalized Medicine – a free tool of Webicina.com that lets you select your favourite medical resources and read the latest news and articles in one personalized place
PubMed Search & News Widget – use it in many social networks, websites and intranet sites, everywhere where it is allowed to put up html code
Health Blogs Observatory – online research laboratory devoted to examination of the health blogosphere

Have you heard about

Yale Image Finder – search PubMed Central articles for images
HINARI – a commendable endeavor on behalf of the WHO to bring to the carers in developing countries the power of evidence either at no cost or greatly reduced costs
Labmeeting – a social bookmarking site to manage and share journal articles
TrialX – free service to enable patients find new treatments in their area
ProQolid – Patient Reported Outcome and Quality of Life Instruments Database

This & That

At Nature Network’s Science Blogging conference last August in London, a call was put out to get senior scientists to start blogging. Corie Lok, Senior Editor of Nature Network, tells us about the winners of the Challenge.

At his blog, Science of the Invisible, Alan Cann has made available his report titled Assessment 2.0: Wikipedia writing projects.

Also now available are audio recording (MP3) and slides (PDF) from the webinar “Achieving Openness: Communicating With People Using Social Networks For Health & Wellness” – said @shwen.

Did you know that there are numerous discussions going on about “web native” lab notebooks? @CameronNeylon explains everything, so all that is left for you is to contribute.

John D. Halamka brings us the joint statement of the chairs of CCHIT, HITSP, and NeHC (AHIC Successor) about their commitment to work together on the healthcare IT.

Finally, GooMedic.com has a nice overview of the iPhone and its medical applications.

That’s all folks!

Hope you had as much fun reading this edition of the Medicine 2.0 Blog Carnival as we had putting it together. Please consider submitting your articles to one of the future Medicine 2.0 blog carnivals or even hosting one yourself.

Laura Cobus is a Head Librarian you wish you had when you were in college. She had designed and delivered a graduate level public health course, Information Research in Public Health, that was based on blogs and wikis. Laura shares her experience in an article, Using Blogs and Wikis in a Graduate Public Health Course, published in the latest issue of the Medical Reference Services Quarterly.

Her course was held in the computer lab with a goal to teach students effective information seeking skills and search strategies focused on public health outcomes. Alongside the lectures, students were required to write their own blogs and create their own wikis. These assignments were conceived to enhance their informational retrieval skills and critically appraisal, as well as to allow them to self-publish and collaborate.

It comes as no surprise that students were very satisfied with this elective course, which should in the future be incorporated into the overall curriculum. Laura Cobus has showed how a creative teacher can advance health education by utilizing Web 2.0 applications. Our only wish is for others to follow her path.

Health Blogs Observatory will be hosting the 37th edition of the Medicine 2.0 Blog Carnival on 22 February 2009. We are really excited, since this will be our first blog carnival. We hope that you are just as thrill as we are and that you will send us a lot of interesting submissions. To have your articles included in the carnival, send us an email until 19 February 2009.

If you by any chance don’t know what a blog carnival is, we suggest that you read about it at Wikipedia.