Technology

Tweeter, Twitter, Blog, Bling, LinkedIn, Linkin Park, Facebook, Facetime. Are you part of the social media generation? Do you know the difference between a tweet and a twerk or are you still trying to figure out how chillax made it into Meriam and Webster? Social media options abound but offer to some a rather confusing array of choices. Which one do I join to find my telemedicine colleagues? Where can I get in on the best "conversations" (yes in quotes!) about what’s hot in mHealth? How on earth do social media intersect with telemedicine and is it really something that could benefit me and my program?

Telemedicine pops up in the most unexpected places! I was fortunate to attend the 4th International Conference on Information Technologies in Biomedicine (ITIB) in Kamień Śląski, Poland (a lovely little town northwest of Krakow which was a seat of knights and noblemen families in the past and where the castle in which St. Jacek was born is located – which is now a quaint conference center and sanatorium) and in addition to image analysis, computer-aided surgery, bioengineering, bioinformatics and signal analysis are 2 sessions dedicated to telemedicine!

Telemedicine, telehealth, e-health, m-health – it’s all healthcare. But where would healthcare be today without informatics? Broadly, healthcare informatics deals with the resources, devices, and methods needed to optimize acquisition, storage, retrieval, and use of information in health and biomedicine. Imaging Informatics is the study and application of processes of information and communications technology for the acquisition, manipulation, analysis, and distribution of medical image data in particular.