We live in a time of rapidly progressing change, with technology transforming industries and directly affecting lives.  One way in which technology is enabling improved healthcare is through telemedicine:

Telemedicine is the use of telecommunication and information technologies in order to provide clinical health care at a distance. It helps eliminate distance barriers and can improve access to medical services that would often not be consistently available in distant rural communities. (Wikipedia)

Historical research has shown the importance telemedicine can play in the healthcare setting. A 2001 pilot study conducted in nursing homes suggested that use of telemedicine decreased the number of visits to the Accidents and Emergency Department  by 9% and decreased the admissions to the acute care hospital setting by 11%. And that's in 2001!

Rats are notorious for spreading nasty diseases. Think the plague, lassa fever and even salmonella. But could some jumbo-size African rodents help health workers diagnose diseases more quickly? They just might. A group in Tanzania is training rats to detect tuberculosis in people. The critters in question are African giant pouched rats. They are about twice the size of your average house gerbil — and half as pretty.

PITTSBURGH-Online crowds can be an important tool for teaching the ins and outs of innovation, educators at Carnegie Mellon University and Northwestern University say, even when the quality of the feedback provided by online sources doesn't always match the quantity.

In my previous post, "Stepping Foot in Wikipedia", I discussed my experiment to engage deeper with the WikiProject Medicine (WP:Med) community to learn the processes and cultural norms within Wikipedia and see if there is a place to build-out a framework for regionalized standard of care information. As promised, I'm here to follow-up on my journey.

Drew Endy wants to build a programming language for the body.

Endy is the co-director of the International Open Facility Advancing Biotechnology — BIOFAB, for short — where he’s part of a team that’s developing a language that will use genetic data to actually program biological cells. That may seem like the stuff of science fiction, but the project is already underway, and the team intends to open source the language, so that other scientists can use it and modify it and perfect it.

Do you donate blood? Or perhaps you're an organ donor. If so, you see the value in contributing - literally, a part of yourself - to the greater good. In addition, you may see the potential direct benefit for you or those you care for. Blood and organ donations are now common practice, and it's easy to see that their value is irrefutable.

What if we extended this concept to data about diseases. Patient registries are ways to bring data together to be used to understand disease, identify clinical trial participants, and, potentially provide statistical power to help develop new disease treatments.

Neuroscientist and former software engineer Ruggero Scorcioni found himself consistently distracted by the phone while he was trying to work. “If I’m busy coding or thinking about research and have phone calls coming in, it’s hard to get back into the same mental state,” says Scorcioni, 42. “Maybe you had a great idea, but then it’s gone.” In January, on a whim, he entered an AT&T app-development hackathon, and came up with a solution.