USA Today Talks About Twitter for HealthCare – Focus on TrialX to Locate Clinical Trials

If you are a regular reader here, no doubt you have seen the TrialX widget whereby you can easily locate clinical trials. It’s located right next to the images/links for Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault. I have also tested and tried the Twitter application a couple months ago and it’s still working, I get regular Tweets on new trials for the information I entered. The real key is to go up to the next level and get specific trial information easily from using your personal health record from Google Health or Healthvault, as this way the results are specific and you won’t have to navigate and eliminate manually those where you would not be deemed a qualified candidate. If you are looking for trials related to cancer, this is big and it makes signing up with an investigator a simple process.

Just a couple days ago there was a bit of a satire written about those who do not see Twitter having any value, and again, it’s those who have not used it, like most rhetoric out on the web today, many who write articles as such are folks that have usually not given an application a try, and base opinions on what other say and not a real test, which focuses back on something else I continue to express, the need for role models. I wrote my opinion below:

Twitter Haters Really Have Missed the Boat! It is A Great Business Communication Tool

From a recent prior post:

If you are a regular reader of this blog, then perhaps you have seen the TrialX Widget on the site, they make it very simple and easy to locate

clinical trials and they also have a Twitter application. The best part of the entire program though is to create a personal health record with Google Health or HealthVault first, then use your parameters entered in your PHR to drill down immediately to trials that are applicable for you, in other words save time having to visit multiple sites with time consuming searching and evaluation to see if you quality as your PHR can do it all for you. This is other way you can put your PHR to work for you.

Last week, I created a widget of Tweets from Remote Area Medical to keep all the updates they provided via Twitter on the free healthcare they provided here in the Los Angeles area for those in need.

In summary, Twitter has a huge place in healthcare and simplifies many communication tasks and should not be overlooked by any means. BD

Modern medicine is taking to Twitter. In a report in Telemedicine and e-Health, medical writer Mark Terry notes that doctors, hospitals and health agencies have started to deliver medicine via Tweet.

"It’s easy to dismiss Twitter because so much of the media attention focused on it looks at how movie stars and celebrities like Ashton Kutcher or Oprah are using it," Terry writes. But the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, hospitals such as the University of Maryland Medical System, and individual doctors have all taken to contacting patients through Twitter.

Since March, a service called "TrialX" connect patients with clinical trials, using Twitter. "The company integrated with two online personal health record providers: Google Health and Microsoft’s HealthVault," notes the report.