Health Literacy

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CPSG Press Release: Reprinted with permission

WORCESTER, MA – December 8, 2010 – The Clinical Pharmacology Study Group (CPSG) announced its selection as a top Expert Curator by OrganizedWisdom for providing people with quality health information online.

OrganizedWisdom’s Medical Review Board selects doctors, nurses, allied health professionals, publishers, patient experts, and health advocates as Expert Curators, those who organize helpful and credible online health resources. “With the explosion of health information publicly shared via social media and available on thousands of Web sites, often without order or full disclosure of the source, there is a need to aggregate the information in a meaningful and useful way,” explains Howard Krein, MD, Chief Medical Officer of OrganizedWisdom and Assistant Professor of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. “OrganizedWisdom is organizing this wealth of health information from the health professionals, experts, and advocates who are using social media as a powerful communication platform for people searching online.”

Dr. Krein states, “Dr. Charles Birbara not only meets the call as an Expert Curator, but exceeds the call, in terms of sharing his expertise and experience with autoimmune disorders online for the benefit of others.”

“As a Medical Practitioner and Associate Professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, I recognize the importance of educating people so they can take charge and making intelligent decisions regarding their health,” states Dr. Birbara, “I am pleased to be selected as a top Expert Curator by OrganizedWisdom’s Medical Review Board for our social communications on Twitter and Facebook.”

Dr. Charles Birbara is recognized as an expert in the field of autoimmune diseases. He has an established rheumatoid arthritis practice and is a Staff Physician at UMASS Memorial Medical Center and St.Vincent Hospital in Worcester, MA. Dr. Birbara’s passion for learning has earned him a position as Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, MA. Dr. Birbara is the Medical Director at the Clinical Pharmacology Study Group and a graduate from Harvard College with a B.A. in Biology and continued on to receive his M.D. at McGill University. Mary Coughlin is the registered nurse for the Clinical Pharmacology Study Group.

To learn more about this subject or to determine if you are eligible for enrollment in an autoimmune study, please contact the:

Clinical Pharmacology Study Group
UMASS Memorial City Campus
26 Queen Street, Worcester, MA 01610
Phone: 508-755-0201
info@cpsgma.com
http://www.cpsgma.com

CONTACT: Deborah A. Buckley
Phone: +1.978.466-7637
Email: deb.buckley@gmail.com

About Clinical Pharmacology Study Group
The Clinical Pharmacology Study Group (CPSG) was established in 1989 in Worcester, Massachusetts by Doctor Birbara and Mary Coughlin, RN. The group has been involved in the field of rheumatology study since 1975. The practice has worked with traditional anti-inflammatory medications (NSAIDs) in conjunction with stomach protecting agents. The group has a history of working with Celebrex, Vioxx, Bextra, and other COX II inhibitors. In the late 1990’s, we entered the era of biologicals for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis (RA).

CPSG is continuing to expand work with biologicals in the areas of rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, psoriatic arthritis and Chrohn’s disease. CPSG is also participating in many new trials for fibromyalgia, osteoarthritis, osteoporosis, gout, and lower back pain.
http://www.cpsgma.com

About OrganizedWisdom
OrganizedWisdom is transforming the way people can use the Internet to answer health questions by organizing all of the world’s health and healthy living experts and advocates by topic, knowledge, and influence. With this first digital mapping of health and healthy living experts and advocates, which includes doctors, nurses, patient advocates, researchers, and other health experts who are publicly sharing health information online, OrganizedWisdom is creating a trust filter to help people easily discover and connect with the credible resources online.

The company’s investors include leading health, technology and business minds: Esther Dyson, Jerry Levin, Roger Ehrenberg, Linda Holliday, Jason Finger, Jeff Stewart and SeventySix Capital. OrganizedWisdom was founded in 2007 in New York City by seasoned entrepreneurs Steven Krein and Unity Stoakes. To learn more visit http://organizedwisdom.com/Home

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Source: Julie Bohlen, MBA-HCM, ELS

Whether they’ve dedicated their careers to specific areas, such as smoking cessation or holistic healing, or prefer to help others more generally, nurses use their knowledge in vastly different ways. See the nurses featured below and other nurses making an impact in social media, elsewhere on the Web, and in their communities in our Top Nurse profiles.

1. @missMedSafety Joanne Peterson, RN, FISMP, CCRN, is a medication safety specialist at a Colorado Springs, Colorado, hospital. Her 41-year career in hospital environments has also taken her into critical care, nursing management, and administration. She has volunteered and served on the boards for many local organizations as well.
2. @rnjoey Joseph Weaver, RN, and author, is passionate about helping others quit smoking. He won the 2002 American Cancer Society’s Great American Smoke-out Award for his leadership in building a smoke-free environment in New York City. Once an overweight, three-pack-a-day smoker, the former neuroscience researcher turned his studies to yoga, reflexology, herbology, and meditation to take a spiritual approach in dealing with his habit. Ninety pounds lighter and nicotine-free, he wrote The Tao of Quitting Smoking, offers workshops and lectures designed to help smokers quit, and maintains CigaretteSmokingKills.com. He recently created a Twitter “Twibe” for posting medical, mental health, and smoking cessation tweets.
3. @JoyceHarrellRN Joyce Harrell, RN, has dedicated the last 12 years of her 20-year nursing career to cancer nursing as an oncology-certified nurse. “Nursing is more than the science of the medical,” she writes, and she takes a holistic approach to healing as a wellness coach in her business, Wellness Cancer Cure. She has created workshops, webinars, and ebooks on the topics of stress management, meal planning, whole foods, wellness for the cancer patient and caregiver, and the art of caring for nurses.
4. @nursekama Kamini Kalia, MScN, RN, is a clinical nurse specialist in a tertiary mental health care setting in southwestern Ontario, Canada. She has given presentations to help teach nurses and other health professionals how to use social media. At her online journal, NurseKama.com, she posts tutorials on that topic.
5. @antidoped Kane Guthrie is an “emergency nurse extraordinaire” with a special interest in toxicology, minor procedures, and mental health issues in the emergency department. He is part of a team of Australian medical experts writing a medical blog called Life in the Fast Lane, which explores “the changing world of eLearning, emergency medicine, critical care and toxicology through clinical cases, fictionalized anecdotes and medical satire.” A recent “Funtabulously Frivolous Friday” posting posed a real history question: “In 1774 a young girl was the first in this country to be successfully treated by this technique after falling from a window. What was it?” Visit the site to find out!

If you know of nurses who are worthy of attention on these pages, please use our contact form to let us know. See How to Become an OrganizedWisdom Expert Curator and Curator Benefits.

Other blog entries featuring health professionals:

Featured Dietitians
Featured Nutritionists
Featured Nurses, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
Featured Nurses, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11
Featured Oncologists, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
Top Nephrologists on Twitter
Top Gastroenterologists on Twitter 
Gluten-Free Diet Feature 
Diabetes Feature: 5 Type 1 Diabetes Patient Experts
Diabetes Feature: 10 Type 1 Diabetes Patient Experts
Follow Friday: Featuring 5 Patient Experts 
Follow Friday: Featuring 5 Impressive Physicians for April's End 
Follow Friday: Featuring 5 Impressive Health Expert Profiles for the Week

By Julie Bohlen, MBA-HCM, ELS

Source: Julie Bohlen, MBA-HCM, ELS

(This article originally appeared on Mashable.com where it was kindly accepted as a guest post. If you too, are passionate about the need for more health experts to engage online to help people, please share feedback or contact me directly).

Is your doctor easily accessible online, or does he or she believe that the Internet isn’t a resource for accessing health information?

If it’s the latter, it may be time to find another doctor. With nearly 90% of online Americans searching the Internet for health resources, it’s likely you and your friends and family already use the Internet to research health issues. It’s true that the web has a jumble of health information, and engaging online takes time, which most health experts don’t have. The good news, however, is that the increasing number of health professionals now embracing the Internet as an important and useful tool for health and wellness is beginning to change your options as a consumer.

Read on for some ways that social media can help doctors, health experts and everyday users.

Social Wellness Trends

An exciting new social media trend is emerging that disrupts the standard view of health care delivery and will have a profound impact on us all. Thousands of doctors, nurses, allied health professionals, and health advocates are publicly engaging with people online. In fact, nearly 40% of Americans turn to social media for health information.

Patients (and a few early adopter health pros) moved online years ago to share health guidance, give support and find answers. But until recently, many health professionals have avoided using the Internet and social media as a way to help patients. This reluctance is changing, as savvy physicians, nurses, dentists and other health pros are realizing that if their patients are online, then perhaps they should be too. Health practitioners who were once too busy, inexperienced or afraid to share their expertise online, now actively share links on Twitter and Facebook, blog, write for online medical journals, engage on Q&A sites, or contribute to online health sites and forums.

For too long, health and wellness has been a do-it-yourself proposition for patients online, and people have been left on their own to determine how to effectively utilize empty search boxes. People have great access to lots of information, but they must sort through the billions of articles to determine the credible from redundant health encyclopedias, marketing web sites or sites with potentially unknown sources. Then, the task of deciding the credibility of the sources and articles has fallen on the patient alone.

While the number of health experts interacting with patients online is relatively small, there is a clear trend taking shape. A recent Manhattan Research survey of U.S. physicians shows an increase of Internet usage for professional purposes up from 2.5 hours per week in 2002 to 8 hours per week in 2010. More strikingly, while more than 100,000 doctors are using closed social health networks like Sermo.com and publishing in peer-reviewed journals online, thousands of health professionals are now blogging, using Twitter, and connecting with patients on Facebook in very public ways. So much so that this November, for the first time, the American Medical Association released a set of guidelines to direct physicians communicating and engaging with patients via social media. And earlier this year, the CDC also published its own best practices toolkit for how health professionals should be using social media.

Given that so many people now go to the Internet before, during and after their visit to the doctor’s office, the lack of guidance from credible and trusted health experts online is a growing problem. In fact, Manhattan Research shows that 61% of people now use the Internet instead of visiting a doctor. Thankfully, the tide is turning as thousands of health practitioners move online to do much more than interact with friends, family and colleagues and are instead using the social web to dispense their particular health expertise.

What This Means for Health Information Seekers

We are standing at the precipice of a new online revolution in health care. As more and more health experts embrace the Internet and increase their social media activity, health information seekers will undoubtedly benefit in profound ways. Based on conversations and surveys conducted with experts and health information seekers, here are some of the benefits associated with a robust online community of active health experts:

Interaction With Experts: In the real world, people seeking answers to important health, financial or legal matters look for guidance from the best experts. With a growing community of health experts participating in online discussions, people have access to more expertise than ever before at their fingertips.

Credibility and Trust: With doctors and other health professionals contributing information online in increasing numbers, it is important for a trust filter to separate credible information and sources from information that is not credible. The community of health professionals that is forming online will act as a system of checks and balances to separate good information and sources from the bad.

Transparency: It’s been a watershed year for increased transparency as government, big business, the financial services industry and other sectors have been shining a light into their operations like never before. Healthcare is taking a major step forward in this regard at the grassroots level, with an expert community being formed online by doctors, nurses and other health professionals across the country. As more doctors view social media as an extension of their professional reputation, you can be sure that they will treat their online interactions with the same care as they do in the offline world.

While the increase in the online activity of health experts is a welcome development, searching for crucial health information online remains an overwhelming and intimidating process for many. In the offline world, people searching for health information seek out the best experts — and now with more health professionals moving online, people will finally be able to connect with credible experts they can trust.

Source: Unity Stoakes

Registered dietitians could be the most proactive people you’ll ever meet when it comes to being on a mission to promote healthy foods. Some raise their voices enough to get national media attention. See the dietitians featured below and other dietitians making an impact in social media, elsewhere on the Web, and in their communities in our Top Dietitians profiles.

1. @dietriffic Melanie Thomassian, RD, writes that her mission is “to transform the lifestyles of a diet-obsessed world by teaching people how to eat healthy and make healthy eating a habit for life.” She started Dietriffic, where she posts “evidence-based information” to help people in their quest for a healthier lifestyle. The Northern Ireland resident also contributes articles to several other health Web sites.
2. @HealthCastleGlo Gloria Tsang, RD, started HealthCastle.com after a family member was diagnosed with cancer. She decided to write and compile cancer nutrition articles so that others could benefit from the information. Since then, the site has become a nutrition resource library. Her articles have been published by Reuters, the Chicago Sun-Times, Reader’s Digest Canada, and USA Today.
3. @DeCA_Dietitian Karen Hawkins, RD, has nearly 20 years of military service, eight as an Army Reserve dietitian and 11 on active duty, including experience as a certified diabetes educator in Army medical facilities and public health clinics. Her column and discussion forum at the Defense Commissary Agency Web site are geared to helping readers lose weight, get in shape, and maintain good health.
4. @KathyGarolsky Kathy Garolsky, registered nurse and clinical nutritionist, is passionate about health and wellness. She teaches others to manage their health and to help themselves using tools and techniques through her blog at Health and Wellness Consultants.
5. @TrendyNutrition Jenny Westerkamp, RD, is a Chicago-based sports and wellness nutritionist “promoting real food as nature intended.” She is a counselor, speaker, and writer, and cofounded All Access Internships, an interactive community and social network for future dietitians. She maintains a health blog at her Web site, JennyWesterkamp.com.
6. @TrinaR_RD Trina Robertson, MS, RD, is the project manager for the Dairy Council of California, where she’s in charge of nutrition education program development and overseeing the consumer nutrition Web site. She writes a blog promoting good nutrition at the council’s Web site.
7. @2eatwellRD Danielle Omar, MS, RD, “shows others how to successfully manage health and personal issues through the power of smart nutrition.” She has contributed to nutrition-related news stories for local TV stations as well as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Food Network. She writes a food and nutrition blog called Food Confidence at her Web site, FoodConfidence.com, and on the home page you can watch videos of her helping others in their quest to get control of their weight. She also has more than 10 years’ experience as an adjunct professor in nutrition science. 
8. @MarshaHudnall Marsha Hudnall, MS, RD, is director and owner of Vermont’s Green Mountain at Fox Run, a healthy weight retreat for women tired of dieting. She is the author of three nutrition books and more than 100 articles published in popular magazines and newsletters that reflect “her desire to help people move away from restrictive notions of food and health, and thereby more easily achieve a healthful intake.” She also writes a blog at Green Mountain’s Web site.
9. @ScritchfieldRD Rebecca J. Scritchfield, MA, RD, is a nutrition and exercise expert in the metro Washington, D.C., area, and a “specialist in healthy weight management without dieting.” She’s an adjunct professor of sports nutrition at George Washington University, a marathon runner, and a media guest. One of the videos posted at her Web site, RebeccaScritchfield.com, features a spirited discussion she had with Fox News broadcaster Neil Cavuto about the wisdom of having salad bars in public schools. 
10. @Etribole Evelyn Tribole, MS, RD, has a nutrition counseling practice in Newport Beach, California, specializing in eating disorders, “intuitive eating,” and celiac disease. She is the author or coauthor of seven books, including the best sellers Healthy Homestyle Cooking and Intuitive Eating. She was contributing editor for Shape magazine, where her monthly column, “Recipe Makeovers,” ran for 11 years. She often appears on national media outlets for her nutritional expertise. Her favorite food? Chocolate, “when it can be savored slowly.”

If you know of registered dietitians who are worthy of attention on these pages, please use our contact form to let us know. See How to Become an OrganizedWisdom Expert Curator and Curator Benefits.

Other blog entries featuring health professionals and patients:

Featured Nutritionists
Featured Nurses, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
Featured Nurses, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11
Featured Oncologists, Part 1
Featured Oncologists, Part 2
Featured Oncologists, Part 3
Top Nephrologists on Twitter
Top Gastroenterologists on Twitter 
Gluten-Free Diet Feature 
Diabetes Feature: 5 Type 1 Diabetes Patient Experts
Diabetes Feature: 10 Type 1 Diabetes Patient Experts
Follow Friday: Featuring 5 Patient Experts 
Follow Friday: Featuring 5 Impressive Physicians for April's End 
Follow Friday: Featuring 5 Impressive Health Expert Profiles for the Week

By Julie Bohlen, MBA-HCM, ELS

Source: Julie Bohlen, MBA-HCM, ELS