
Introducing The Conversation Prism
... getting to grips with the use of iPodTouch/iPhone in health... the iPatient, the iNurse, the iDoctor, the iAdministrator... including the practicalities of working with such devices at the beginning... extending out to Web 2.0 technologies in general in health care and their implications... with special reference to how and where Annalisa 2.0+ fits as a practical, interactive, web-based implementation of Multi-Criteria Decision Analytical Support in Patient/Person-Centric Health Care
"What is needed is a completely new paradigm of health, one that places a much stronger emphasis on prevention and wellness over intervention. We can refer to this new paradigm as "home-centered health care"—built on a system in which health management begins at home, connects to physicians and care teams, and circles back to home.
The good news is that many of the pieces we need to accomplish the social transformation to this new paradigm—from intervention to prevention and wellness—are already in place. A number of megatrends are developing to help the paradigm along, including health consumer empowerment, physician movement toward partnership and team approaches that include clinical care and educational support, expansion of the Internet and technology to the people and their caregivers, expanded understanding of the causes and treatments for the major chronic diseases, and a very public debate about the benefits and risks of the health choices we make."

WolframAlpha is a helpful reference for understanding what the tests measure and how to interpret the results. WolframAlpha allows you to query information on a specific medical test or a panel of tests, compare tests and results for patients with specific characteristics, compute your estimated risk for heart disease, and find the diagnosis corresponding to an ICD-9 code. WolframAlpha can take into account specific patient characteristics like gender, age, smoker, non-smoker, pregnant, diabetic, obese, and underweight. WolframAlpha can give you a snapshot of available data that might help you understand how your results compare to others'.WolframAlpha can provide a number of interesting medical statistics including body measurements, physical exercise, diseases, mortality, medical tests, and medical computations. You can see other examples of Health & Medicine uses here. For example to determine the benefits of running 20 minutes for a 28-year-old 5'11" 185lb male, then type: running 20min, 6min/mi, 28yo male, 5'11", 185lb into the search box."
