Cast & Curious

Tag: research

  • Ethical Considerations of using Social Media in Healthcare Research

    Social media has the potential of increasing public awareness and participation in healthcare research. It is a promising new area for exploring “how patients conceptualize and communicate specific health issues”. The heightened public awareness encourages more enrollment and participation in potentially beneficial clinical trials.

    Healthcare research on social media poses new ethical dilemmas however. Such research on a new public environment may require new ethical guidelines. Privacy issues remains on top of these ethical concerns. Without clear guidelines, investigators are at loss on how to meet their responsibilities to participants and the medical profession. Should they ask consent for investigating healthcare data that are on public space?

    Finally, interpreting data from social media healthcare research remains a challenge. To be valid, data mining, monitoring signals and validation of social media vocabularies often needs corroboration from other methods of obtaining healthcare information.

    Join #HealthXPh chat this Saturday January 21, 2017 9:00 PM Manila time as we discuss these ethical issues in conducting healthcare research on social media:

    • T1. Is informed consent needed when using data gathered from social media?
      T2. Should investigators make public their intentions of doing healthcare social media research? Why? or why not?
      T3.What are the limitations of healthcare research on social media??

    Just use the hashtag #HealthXPh when joining this twitter chat on Saturday.

    Header photo/poster courtesy of  Matthew S. Katz MD; Disease-specific hashtags for online communication about cancer care. 2015 ASCO Annual Meeting publication

    References:

    1. Sedrak MS, Cohen RB, Merchant RM, Schapira MM. Cancer Communication in the Social Media Age. JAMA Oncol. 2016;2(6):822-823. doi:10.1001/jamaoncol.2015.5475
    2. Matthew S. Katz et al. J Clin Oncol 33, 2015 (suppl; abstr 6520)
    3. Denecke K; Ethical aspects of using medical social media in healthcare applications.Stud Health Technol Inform. 2014;198:55-62.
    4. Holly A. Taylor, Ellen Kuwana, and Benjamin S. Wilfond; Ethical Implications of Social Media in Health Care Research; The American Journal Of Bioethics Vol. 14 , Iss. 10,2014

  • Orthopedics six years after residency training, what now?

    Four major subspecialty service of UP-PGH Orthopedics which also parallels its pilars: Leadership and excellence in training, service and research

    I just came back from an orthopedic fellow’s convention and the Ruby Anniversary (40th) celebration of my former orthopedic training institution. Aside from the maxed out celebration with former (tor)mentors and alumni, I got one serious question unanswered afterwards- What now?

    Seeing the glorious past of an iconic institution, and sensing the current status of a top notch residency program, I am reminded by the vision and mission the department. The same vision and mission somehow answered the very question thrown on me by an alumni and mentor.

    Where are you now in your orthopedic practice? Are you in pursuit of our department’s pillars of leadership and excellence  in training, research, and service?

    A very had question to answer and I can swear I had to think deep enough into the recesses of my orthopedic practice to assemble my answer. There is no doubt in my mind the department’s alumni are in the forefront orthopedic’s training and service in Philippine orthopedics. What I saw and heard during our Ruby Anniversary partly reaffirmed this.  Well, I  “rubbed elbows” and chit chatted with famous/celebrity/controversial orthopedic surgeons in the Philippines I listened to stories of alumni who practiced unknown territories where no other Filipino orthopod dare went into. In fact, almost every nook of Philippine orthopedics nowadays is led or being push up front by no less than the graduates of our institution, be it for excellence or some other things.

    Research on the other hand, lags behind among these pillars that the department is excelling at. Such was an assessment by some former mentors and alumni, if we are to base it on the number of quality, evidenced based researches published on peer reviewed journals here or abroad. Sadly, such also applies to me. The last orthopedic related research I’ve done was six years ago and thats was during my residency training. In a community practice outside a training institution, the chances of you doing orthopedic research is practically nil. I blame it on nobody, but myself. During residency, we had this one common “Limitations of the Study” written in almost all our orthopedic research. It says “not enough study population”. Today, in my practice, that would still be a limitation. But many of former mentors mention this one reason:

    “Many of our graduates outside a training institution don’t do orthopedic research anymore because research don’t feed mouths. Instead of providing money, you need money to do research. Research entails a great deal of commitment in terms of time, money  and effort. Commitment who couldn’t compete with the drive to earn money for living, comfortably”

    Yes. I’m guilty too and these was an aye opener. At least now, I can set a direction to where my practice could focus more to improve service. Perhaps one day I can still live up to the expectations of my department’s vision and mission.  No it’s never late. Like what many have said, there’s so many areas to learn and research on Philippine orthopedics. Not many formal and evidence based researches have been done. Not many got published. That makes Philippine orthopedics still a fertile ground for research.