• The Web 2.0-EBM Medicine split.
  [1] Introduction into a short series. | Laika’s MedLibLog

  In the first of a series of posts, Laika discusses the division between evidence-based medicine and medicine 2.0.

• 10 Tips: How to filter discussions on Twitter? | ScienceRoll

  Use Twitter? Have trouble keeping up with all the tweets? Berci Mesko shares some tips on how to follow efficiently.

• Top Healthcare Conversations of 2008 | Healthcare NBIC

  Jack Powers, director of the the International Informatics Institute (IN3.ORG), documents the January 1, 2009 Health Memes from around the web.

• Cancer Research Blog Carnival #17 | Blind.Scientist

  New to the Cancer Research Carnival, Blind.Scientist hosts the 17th edition, covering some great cancer studies and a cancer patient's perspective on what's really important: less doing, more being.

• How Good Are Doctor Rating Sites? | e-Patients.net

  Dr. John Grohol reviews a report on doctor rating sites and addresses the issue of statistical significance.

• The Ultimate Medical Privacy Guide: 100 Tools and Resources to Secure Your Health Records | Online Nursing Degree Guide

  100 tools and resources to make an informed decision about putting your health records online.

• Michael Frank probes neurogenetic basis of “oops!” | biomarker-driven mental health 2.0

  Mistakes, we all make 'em. Dr. John Fossella reviews a study that provides insight in the way human error-processing works.

As Highlight HEALTH celebrates its’ second year promoting advances in biomedical research to encourage health literacy, I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your continued readership.

Three websites make up the Highlight HEALTH Network:

• Highlight HEALTH
• Highlight HEALTH 2.0
• The Highlight HEALTH Web Directory

Each of these sites has a different purpose. Here at Highlight HEALTH, we focus on evidence-based biomedical research to educate readers and empower patients (if you’re interested in contributing, please let us know). Highlight HEALTH 2.0, a group effort, follows the use of Web 2.0 in health and medicine. Lastly, the Highlight HEALTH Web Directory is an online reference guide for reliable health and medical information.

There are more ways than ever to connect with the Highlight HEALTH Network, including email/RSS, Twitter and Facebook. If you have an internet-enabled cell phone, Highlight HEALTH can be accessed via the mobile web.

Top 20 most popular articles

Here are the most popular articles for 2008 (top 20 based on the number of page views/number of days posted):

1. Grand Rounds 5.14 Holiday Edition
2. Metabolic Changes in Human Brain Evolution and Schizophrenia
3. Encephalon #58 - Decision Making
4. Potential Location of Autism Genes Identified
5. The New Placebo: Prescribing Positive Expectations with Real Drugs
6. 2008 Presidential Candidates on the Issues of Biomedical Research and Healthcare
7. Health Search and the Semantic Web
8. The Power of Gratitude to Cultivate Happiness
9. Neurodegenerative Disease and the Coming Epidemic
10. Chiropractic Adjustments and Artery Dissection: Is Your Neck in Safe Hands?
11. Viral-based Human Disease and the Nobel Prize for Medicine
12. New Highlight HEALTH Network RSS Feed
13. Closing Arguments on Big Tobacco, Boston Legal Style
14. The Cancer Genome Atlas Reports Molecular Characterization of Brain Tumors
15. Highlight HEALTH Goes Mobile
16. Gene Expression Can Predict the Survival of Lymphoma Patients
17. Health Highlights - October 7th, 2008
18. HelixGene Foundation to Ensure Responsible Reporting of Genomic Medicine
19. Cancer Research Blog Carnival #13 - Stand Up To Cancer
20. Overeating Fast Food Carbs Causes Signs of Liver Damage

Thank you and Best of Health in the coming year!

Mednar and GoPubMed have been voted Top Health Search Engines of 2008 by two independent measures.

Mednar is a federated search engine designed to quickly access information from a multitude of credible sources. Federated search is a new way to comprehensively search multiple databases in real time, ensuring a superior level of search results by ignoring outdated articles, irrelavant research and spam. Mednar offers several tools to narrow searches, drill down into topics and discover new information sources.

GoPubMed is a knowledge-based search engine for the life sciences and is based on PubMed, a service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine that includes over 18 million citations from MEDLINE, the world’s most comprehensive source of life sciences and biomedical bibliographic information, and other life science journals for biomedical articles dating back to 1948. Once keywords are submitted to PubMed, the resulting abstracts are classified using Gene Ontology (a hierarchical vocabulary for molecular biology covering cellular components, biological processes and molecular functions) and Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), a hierarchical vocabulary covering biomedical and health-related topics. Quite simply, GoPubMed enables users to find more relevant information significantly faster.

According to Hope Leman at AltSearchEngines, Mednar ranked number one:

A product of the firm Deep Web Technologies (which helped design another winner of this list, WorldWideScience.org), Mednar promises to become a standard tool of power searchers in the health sciences (e.g. medical librarians, physicians, healthcare researchers) and for savvy consumer searchers who want sleek supplements to such standard tools as MedlinePlus and PubMed. Mednar offers access to an array of databases that are simply not mined by other health search engines and features a dependable email alert service that enables users to keep up on the latest publications on the medical topics of their choice. Mednar is the Secretariat and gold medal winner of medical search at this point.

Second on the list is GoPubMed:

GoPubMed has actually been around a few years, but made this list because it is such a superb tool. It is a useful complement to PubMed proper and those used to PubMed will love the ability to work seamlessly in GoPubMed and PubMed simultaneously, particularly to determine who the leading authorities are on particular topics. GoPubMed also features a mediated service that enables users to send emails to the researchers thus found, which is a public service in that it can foster fruitful researcher to researcher interactions and generate good will among the general public and those in the research realm.

Read about The Top 10 Health Search Engines of 2008 at AltSearchEngines.com.

Bedside health search engines

Dr. Mike Cadogan, an emergency physician that writes at Life in the Fast Lane, created his own list of top health search engines for 2008:

My list is based on ‘rapid resolution’ at the bedside (or at least pretty close to it!). Needing to find answers to clinical questions, guidelines, images to demonstrate signs and recent references … here is my list of the best Health Search Engines for 2008.

Perhaps not surprisingly, both Mednar and GoPubMed topped the list. Check out Mike’s list of Top Bedside Health Search Engines of 2008.

Health search + patient-to-patient social network

I’d like to add iMedix to the list of Top Health Search Engines for 2008. I wrote a review on iMedix back in October. iMedix is a community-powered healthcare search engine, which combines a vertical health search engine with a patient-to-patient social network. iMedix uses proprietary algorithms to evaluate healthcare websites and rate top sources. Just like Mednar and GoPubMed, I think it’s a fantastic resource for health consumers to find credible sources of health information.

How will you search for credible health information online in 2009?