For portals, speak patients' language ( c/o Healthcare IT News )

Mike Miliard's 

For portals, speak patients' language 

in Healthcare IT News is a reminder of accessibility and engagement at the level of a communities languages.

This is one of the reasons why I am committed to using Drupal, to try to make use of its Internationalization capabilities amongst others. 

Thanks to Mike's post I'm now familiar with a 'full court press' as a hospital - enterprise wide no less - seeks to achieve defined patient engagement levels by accessing their electronic health record.

This begs the question of what constitutes the patients' language? I don't just mean the purely linguistic forms of Chinese, Korean, Russian and Greek mentioned in the article. The effort is driven by the statutory demands of meaningful use, but what of the patient's general literacy, IT and health literacies? How do patients make sense of their own health (or another in the role of a carer) not just in a given language, but culturally from a medical sociological and public health perspective? What is the community's vocabulary when it comes to health?

How can we assure that meaningfulness? How can we affirm that use and critically translate use into patient benefits and self-efficacy?

You could also entitle Mike's article as

4 portals speak patients' language

individual

INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES

humanistic ------------------------------------------- mechanistic

SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL

group

Health Literacy, Accessibility	Measures (health literacy, patient engagement, health and well-being, clinical outcomes)
Cultural Diversity, Languages, Carer	Internationalization 'Meaningful Use', Standards, Legislation, Policy

When we focus on languages we must remember that listening is a great gift. Whether as health and IT professionals, educators, patients and carers, listening to the care domains can help us integrate diverse social, clinical, policy and technical objectives.

What do these portals say to you?

Mike Miliard twitter

Drupal 8 An Introduction

MEMO: .health as a top-level domain

m e m o r a n d u m

Date:	20 May 2014
To:	ICANN
From:	PETER JONES
Subject:

Please do not try to put a full stop to ongoing efforts to utilise the internet to benefit the true health and well-being of the world's citizens.

The work is a challenge, much has been achieved and there is great promise for the future and not merely through the quantified self, personalised medicine, biotechnology and the virtual healthcare market. ...

The self, indeed this whole effort must be assured, integrated and qualified.

This means of course that the provenance, standards and values vested in health related data, information and knowledge must be of the highest quality.

Then - we can start to think about -




Yours sincerely,

Peter Jones

Additional link:
http://www.jmir.org/2014/3/e73/

[hifa2015] World Medical Association calls for a moratorium on the sale of the .health top-level domain

Dear colleagues,

The World Medical Association has called for a moratorium on the sale of the .health top-level domain (TLD). This is significant as the WMA 'is an international organization representing approximately 9 million physicians of all specialties and sectors.'

Below are extracts from a letter from the WMA Secretary-General dated 8th March to ICANN (the body that administers internet domains). The full letter is available here:

http://www.icann.org/en/news/correspondence/kloiber-to-chehade-et-al-11mar14-en.pdf

'By now the ICANN Board is aware that .health is one of the ten most opposed new gTLDs...'

'... We, the World Medical Association (WMA), add our voice to recommend that the auction of the .health gTLD not go forward.'

Best wishes,
Neil
-----
[ c/o Neil Pakenham-Walsh ]

Let's build a future where people are no longer dying for lack of healthcare knowledge: Join HIFA www.hifa2015.org

Drupalcon Munich 2012 [i]

Drupalcon Munich 2012 Group Photo

Well another European Drupalcon has been and gone. It was an awesome event in Munich; the venue, sessions, organisation and the community. It all proved a brilliant experience even without the night time thunder and lightening.

I'm not sure if this particular sponge is saturated to its limited capacity, but compared with previous years I took fewer notes and haven't posted as yet. The (glaring) take home lesson for me remains the same. Write less: do!

The notes I do have started after the first keynote by Dries Buytaert on the State and future of Drupal. Personally, I prefer a presentation rather than the interview format. A change in format must be a relief for Dries and for circuit regulars, but despite a visual interlude the social negotiation seemed for me to get in the way of the show and tell. Given that though Drupal is a year aware from the next release, so this reduces the 'news'. Portland 2013 will no doubt be literally more telling.

I did scribble some ..., on Entities and Properties and attending How to Dominate the Theme Layer. Useful to consider that the visual hierarchy may not match the outline of your site in terms of information architecture. The idea of styling now and injecting classes later has much appeal. I am enthralled by the prospect of font selection, colour and other site design aspects.

There were several sessions on Multilingual sites in D7 & D8. The pros and cons of node level translation vs. field level translation were explained, the latter being considered the best model for most use cases and set to be the likely default in D8. Given the cons of translation and the need to keep it simple I would set about limiting translation to Brian Hodges' original course notes and a new introduction to h2cm. Another key question referred to the type of experience you are building - is it totally symmetrical or asymmetric?

More to follow. 
Photo source:
http://blog.erdfisch.de/2012/08/drupalcon-munich-2012-opening-drupal-association-and-international-communities

Context, locus, photos and festival-non-goer (Ack. FT)

In the Financial Times, Life & Arts section, June 23/June 24 2012 Francis Hodgson wrote Hocus-focus about the 15th PHotoEspaña festival.

The curator Gerardo Mosquera introduced the broad theme of the festival -

From Here: Context and Internationalisation

- which Hodgson feels provides 'no secure binder between disaprate elements':

' "Context," he writes opaquely, "has ceased to be a 'closed' locus linked to a reductive concept of what is local; instead it is projected as a space from which international culture is naturally constructed."

Apart from giving a broad hint that pictures will come from around the world, I'm not sure that is much help for a festival-goer.' p.10.

Although I'm a festival-non-goer in this case and my access to the images is limited to the three published in the FT and online, I wonder if a link here is the interposition of local and global? The conurbation that can be described as glocal? This is what that single sentence says to me.

In accord with our economic times the festival website notes that:

PHotoEspaña has cut its budget by 25%. The public-private partnership model has been adapted to ensure a broad-based programme of exhibitions and activities.

In this sense here at least art reflects health care. The reliance on partnership, overcoming constraints whilst providing an experience that coheres.

25%

This context.

One care domain.

Which domain do we cut - the interpersonal, the social, political, the scientific? Do we vary the top-slicing across the domains? In health too we must grasp what is local, global and glocal to us.