Google Flu Trends

Flu Trends in Norfolk, Virginia.

The dark blue line is the Google "estimate" based upon evaluation of search terms.  The lighter colors represent past year efforts.

This is from the Google Flu Trends website.

The MedBiquitous Consortium

Just came across this organization, MedBiquitous.

The MedBiquitous Consortium develops IT standards for healthcare education and quality improvement.

According to their website:

Founded by Johns Hopkins Medicine and leading professional medical societies, MedBiquitous is a not-for-profit, international group of professional associations, universities, commercial, and governmental organizations seeking to develop and promote technology standards for the health professions that advance lifelong learning, continuous improvement, and better patient outcomes. MedBiquitous is accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) to develop information technology standards supporting the health professions.

MedBiquitous members are creating a technology blueprint for advancing the health professions. Based on XML and Web services standards, this blueprint will weave together the many activities, organizations, and resources that support the ongoing education and improvement of healthcare professionals. Ultimately, this blueprint will seamlessly support the learner in ways that will improve patient outcomes and simplify the administrative work associated with lifelong learning and continuous improvement.

  Their standards and development efforts include work in the following areas:

• Activity Reporting
• Competencies
• Curriculum Inventory
• Educational Achievement
• Educational Trajectory
• Healthcare Learning Object Metadata
• Medical Education Metrics
• Performance Framework
• Professional Profile
• SCORM for Healthcare
• Virtual Patients

How Visualization Can Enable Understanding

The good folks at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) have developed an animation that helps to communicate the science of "vulnerable plaques" to the doctors, scientists, students, industry professionals and patients who need to understand it.

Two-thirds of all heart attacks are caused by something known as vulnerable plaques, which are fatty lipid pool deposits in the inner layer of the arterial wall.

This work was accomplished with the help of sophisticated visualization expertise and techniques from TACC and their Faculty Innovation Center.

"Modeling these very complicated systems involves solving millions of equations each time step, and for millions of time steps, so the computational burden is enormous," Hughes said. "For a computational institute like ICES, having an advanced computing center like TACC available is a platform for all of our research," said Thomas Hughes, a professor at The University of Texas at Austin's Institute for Computational and Engineering Sciences.

Read more here.

From http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/news/press-releases/2012/tacc-aids-cardiovascular-disease-research

Paul Boom: The Psychology of Everything

While there is no mention of medical modeling and simulation in this video, this quick but thorough introduction to psychology is definitely worth the 43 minutes it will take you to watch it.  I find it important to understand the base reasons behind why people like or dislike certain things, and what motivates people.  Dr. Bloom excels at reducing this information into layman's terms in this video.