Blog Review: Health Informatics Blog

The featured blog is the ‘Health Informatics‘ blog. In the first post Chris Paton, a medical doctor who lectures in health informatics in New Zealand introduces the blog.  His  blog covers a number of Mental Health Informatics topics and is both well presented and highly organised. On the right side of the panel there are a number of features which increase the accessibility of the blog. Thus the reader can subscribe to an RSS feed or subscribe using e-mail or else Twitter and Del.icio.us which are currently quite popular. He has also placed his profile on Linked In which effectively provides a webpage to place the profile on, complete with links to other sites. Then there also a number of the more standard options that tend to be used frequently in other blogs including archives, blogroll and recent posts.

One feature that I found particularly useful was the referencing of videos on YouTube and other video sites which provide information relevant to topics under discussion. For instance here is a discussion of the Electronic Health Records at Stanford. This theme of electronic records is followed closely through the blog and there are many references to the NHS Connecting for Health services as well as the Health IT Stimulus over in the United States. There are updates to conferences including the Web 2.0 conference and as Paton is keeping his finger on the pulse this is a useful way of keeping up-to-date with health informatics developments.

Paton’s blog is focused on health informatics  and contains links to other sites with interesting and relevant information. As Paton is very effective at tracking down health informatics videos, this is particularly useful for people who learn more quickly by accessing multimedia educational material. There are a number of recurrent themes such as electronic patient records which are relevant to Mental Health Informatics also.

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Disclaimer

The comments made here represent the opinions of the author and do not represent the profession or any body/organisation. The comments made here are not meant as a source of medical advice and those seeking medical advice are advised to consult with their own doctor. The author is not responsible for the contents of any external sites that are linked to in this blog.