Reviews

University of Minnesota Unveils Online Healthcare Publications Portal

Jeff O'Connor — Mon, 17 Apr 2006 09:46:00 GMT

This has been a good week for healthcare in the media. First, Yahoo! launched Expert Blogs on Yahoo! Health, and now this:

MINNEAPOLIS - Newspaper and magazine health coverage will be reviewed online at a new Web site beginning Monday.

Access to the site and its findings, http://www.HealthNewsReview.org, is free and open to consumers. It was created by University of Minnesota journalism professor Gary Schwitzer, who fashioned the site after similar efforts in Australia and Canada.

"For consumers, we hope it will help them improve their critical thinking about claims in health care," said Schwitzer, who directs a graduate program in health care journalism.

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It looks like I have another RSS feed to add to the old start page!

Expert Blogs on Yahoo! Health

Jeff O'Connor — Sat, 15 Apr 2006 23:44:00 GMT

Yahoo! has introduced Health Expert Blogs on Yahoo! Health. I'm not sure if this is part of the “social Web” model Yahoo! is gambling their future on, a symptom of what happens when 1 out of 5 Americans has no health insurance, or merely an outgrowth of the blogging phenomenon. Whatever the company's motivation, Yahoo! has really delivered.

There are fourteen blogs covering twelve topics:

Aging & Caregiving
Asthma & Allergies
Breast Cancer
Child & Family Health
Cholesterol & Heart Disease
Depression & Anxiety
Diabetes and Living With Diabetes
Nutrition & Weight Loss
Pregnancy
Sex & Relationships and Sexual Health
Sports Medicine & Exercise
Yoga

Some of the bloggers are “powered by” very prestigious organizations and institutions. Nutrition & Weight Loss, for example, is provided by Johns Hopkins Medicine. Others, like Sex & Relationships are associated with third-party Web sites.

Yahoo! Health has, in my opinion, always been better than its counterpart at MSN, and the addition of expert blogs has only increased its lead. Yahoo! Health has had discussion boards and has been integrated with Yahoo! Groups for a while now; message boards are the most recent addition to MSN Health & Fitness and the site's health experts don't interact with them. Oddly enough they don't blog either; they selectively respond to email instead (the “Ann Landers” model).

Send Google Pack Packing Says Paul Thurrott

Jeff O'Connor — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 17:24:00 GMT

Admittedly not directly related to healthcare information systems, I personally don't know very many people who go oneline and don't use Google's search engine.

Although I'm the first to admit there is no other search engine nearly as capable as Google that I'm aware of it, I try to avoid using it if all possible because I find some of the company's business practices suspect, arrogant, or both. Also, many of their products - from Gmail to Google Talk - are honestly pretty mediocre.

While I give Google credit for the concept behind Google Pack, I agree with Paul Thurrott that Google blew the execution:

While virtually every computer company on earth is scared to death of Google, and virtually every PC user seems to be in love with them, Google Pack serves nicely as a reality check. Not only is Google human, buts the flaws in Google Pack suggest that this company has a long, long way to go before it can ever justify its insanely lofty stock price. Google Pack is a mixed bag of applications, some useful and some not, though virtually all are deficient in some way as packaged here. I applaud Google for trying to make the PC experience simpler and more secure, but shipping out-of-date security products is even worse than not shipping them at all, because users will get a false sense of security and believe they're protected when in fact they are not. Google Pack is still in beta, so the more glaring issues can be fixed by a final release, if there is one. But this initial version of Google Pack is an embarrassment to the company. It's just a mess.

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As someone who is paid to make recommendations to very bright, very capable, but often very computer-illiterate people regarding which software tools to use and which to avoid in order to make their lives easier and more productive, I have to agree with Paul Thurrott and pass on Google Pack.

Sometimes Your Own Dog Food Doesn't Taste So Good

Jeff O'Connor — Thu, 07 Jul 2005 04:12:00 GMT

I'm not too embarrassed to say that I was one of the original purchasers of the original Handspring Visor Deluxe back in 1998 (or was it 1999?) who shelled out nearly $300 for a PDA that looked like it had escaped from a roll of Life Savers. Plus, I had plunked-down nearly another $100 for accessories!

I don't know which of the first 50,000 or so people I was, but I do know that I was a part of the first wave of purchasers who overwhelmed Handspring's servers. Instead of being one of the first people to actually get the PDA, however, I fell way behind in the race to see who would get to play with their new toy first, as Handspring had a hell of a time salvaging the part of their data that pertained to shipping the device.

(Ironically, the part of the data that pertained to billing my credit card worked just fine. Go figure.)

In the end I received my PDA and my other geek swag a little late and a lot free. Handspring refunded my money and let me keep my new toys. How much of their decision had to do with the fact that I had spent the day emailing variations on senior managers' names to @handspring.com, threatening to gripe about my situation on however many bulletin boards and chat rooms I could find I'm not sure. In any case, I was so impressed with that sort of service that I stuck by Handsrpring, buying other Visors for my brother and a friend's son as graduation gifts, and the Treo 300 for myself when it came out.

Over time, I bought a lot of Treo 300s, mostly because the flip-top hinge on the right-side of the device is extremely poorly designed and partly because it was economical - for a while at least - to cover the $39.95 deductible and replace the unit twice per year when the hinge finally gave-out and the top snapped off.

(Sprint, my cellphone provider, acknowledges the design flaw but blames “user error“ whenever it crops-up. I'd drop them, except that my entire family is on their network).

The last time this happened was just over a month ago, and I had decided long beforehand that I would upgrade my Treo 300 rather than replace it for the umpteenth time. The Treo 650 was the obvious choice, but then I noticed the PPC-6600 with its Pocket PC OS, larger screen, and virtually identical price and found myself in a dilemma: Palm or Microsoft?

The senior IS leadership of the organization I work for doesn't particularly care for Microsoft for a number of reasons, several of which have nothing to do with the technical merits of their products (and, to be fair, a few key gripes that do). Like most of the rest of the planet we run Windows and Office on the desktop, but beyond that it's Solaris or Linux, take your pick. We also don't use Outlook or Lotus Notes, which causes a lot of heartache for people who want/need real PIM software, whether they use a PDA or not. On the plus side, since our email and calendaring application doesn't talk to either Palm or Pocket PC devices there's no incentive to pick one sort of device over the other; it's totally the user's call.

Despite the fact that I am unashamedly in the Microsoft camp when it comes to most questions of technology, making a decision didn't come easy for me. Eventually however, I chose to “eat my own dog food“ and purchase the PPC-6600 because it came with Pocket Word and Pocket Excel. I figured these applications would make it a powerful tool that would allow me to save some of the trees I murder every year filling-up notebooks with indecipherable chicken scratch. I also liked the idea of being able to take a call and use other applications simultaneously, which is a real limitation of the Treo 300 and, I'm told, of the Treo 650. All-in-all, it seemed like a way to improve my productivity for a bit less than half the price of an entry-level laptop from Dell (after rebates), and only $30 more than the functionally similar Treo 650.

I don't regret the purchase, but I'm nowhere near as thrilled with it, pound-for-pound, as I was with my old monochrome Handspring Visor with its proprietary expansion slot and 8 MB of RAM when it first arrived. The size and weight doesn't bother me - my old Treo 300 was just as unwieldy, less useful, and more fragile (and nowhere near as kewl). The functionality of Pocket Word and Pocket Excel are a bit underwhelming, though - I go through almost as many gyrations cutting-pasting-reformatting the content of Pocket Word documents into regular .doc files as I used to with simple text taken from my Treo's Notes application. And the mess that Pocket Word makes of a regular .doc file when you reverse the process is a real shocker the first time you need to show a Customer a document that has (or in my case, had) a table embedded in it!

The Treo 300 is often criticized as being a PDA that someone stuck a phone onto, and the resulting instability of its Palm 3.x OS often proved that criticism to be justified. To my dismay, my PPC-6600 is nearly as buggy, though it's problems seem to be random and not tied to any particular application that I can tell. In addition to about a half-dozen reboots, I've also had to do two full restores from back-up already. Assuming that half are “freebies“ from being a new user, the amount of “real“ restoration work after just five weeks is still a disappointment. Adding insult to injury is the fact that the very first thing I installed on the PPC-6600 after I brought it home was its OS upgrade from Microsoft, which is supposed to correct known instabilities in the Pocket PC OS.

I once read a review of the PPC-6600 that billed it as a viable alternative to a laptop for a “power user.” Assuming I qualify as the latter, the PPC-6600 isn't the former. It's not bad, but it's not great; it's the Treo 300 of its generation. And for what a PPC-6600 costs, I won't be upgrading it any sooner than I upgraded its predecessor!