OrganizedWisdom Health Blog

Featured Nurses, Part 2

A love of the profession took this group of nurses in various directions. Recent college graduates are transitioning away from campus life and into the nursing world. Longtimers have accrued years of hard-earned knowledge and put it toward establishing specialized careers. View their OrganizedWisdom profiles below:

1. @andyatFAD Andy McPhee was an RN for more than 20 years, working in critical care, drug and alcohol detox, and medical, rehabilitative, and clinical units. He also taught an LPN program for 10 years. For the past 25 years, he has worked in the publishing field as a writer, editor, and now senior acquisitions editor at F.A. Davis Company, an independently owned medical publisher, where he helps “new and experienced authors translate their vision for books into full reality.” In addition, he blogs “to help my authors better understand the writing and publishing process, help others interested in writing and publishing in healthcare . . . and sometimes just to get stuff off my chest.”


2. @angespejo Angela Espejo recently graduated from the University of Alberta in Edmonton, where she was part of a leadership team for a nonprofit, participated in groups for young leadership development, and volunteered extensively with nursing organizations and for nursing student representation. As a graduate nurse, she is preparing to become an RN, and is working in Halifax, Canada, as part of their New Graduate Transition program for nurses. Her blog, FourLettersLatter.com, is about making the journey from campus life to the professional world.


3. @momblevins Anne Blevins, BSN, RN, is a clinical nurse specialist and wound care clinical coordinator at Drake Center, a medical and rehabilitative care facility in Cincinnati, Ohio. She received the 2009 Outstanding Research in Wound Care award by the National Alliance of Wound Care. She has authored and co-authored numerous clinical posters and case studies that have been published in wound care journals as well as presented at wound care conferences.


4. @Ashleigh_RN Ashleigh Pugh-Clarke, MN, BScN, RN, CON(C) is an educator and technology coordinator at de Souza Institute, an oncology nursing center in Toronto. Pugh is CNA-certified in oncology and has worked in the field since 2006. She is currently developing a course on the foundations of oncology nursing, a “cancer 101” course that will be delivered through eLearning. “I LOVE technology,” she writes, and she recently began a blog, deSouzaNurse, where she explores current issues, news, and Web sites that are relevant to oncology nurses; because three people close to her are fighting cancer, she touches on the personal as well.


5. @barbaraphillips Barbara C. Phillips, MN, is a nurse practitioner, business coach, and health coach whose career of over 30 years has taken her into critical care, hospice, primary care, long-term care, and home care. She now has her own clinical practice, has developed webinars and teleclasses, and founded Nurse Practitioner Business Owners, where the idea for a blog “was born (in 2007) out of the need and frustration for Nurse Practitioners in private, independent practice to be able to connect, share resources, offer support, and learn from one another.”

If you know of nurses who are worthy of attention on these pages, please tweet your recommendation to @organizedwisdom in this format: “I recommend @[username] as a top nurse for @OrganizedWisdom,” or use our contact form.

Featured Obstetrician-Gynecologists, Part 1
Featured Chiropractors, Part 1
Featured Neurologists, Part 1
Featured Cardiologists, Part 1, Part 2
Featured Dietitians, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
Featured Nutritionists, Part 1, Part 2
Featured Nurses, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
Featured Nurses, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11
Featured Oncologists, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
Top Nephrologists on Twitter
Top Gastroenterologists on Twitter 
Gluten-Free Diet Feature 
Type 1 Diabetes Patient Experts, Part 1, Part 2 

By Julie Bohlen, MBA-HCM, ELS

Featured Nurses, Part 1

When you think of registered nurses, you might assume they all work in hospitals, treating patients. These RNs have directed their careers in different and distinctive ways. View their OrganizedWisdom profiles below:

1. @AbBrody Ab Brody, RN, PhD, is a senior health services researcher for the Sutter Health Institute for Research and Education and an adjunct assistant professor at the University of California-San Francisco School of Nursing, Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences. His main interests are geriatric and palliative care, and for several years he provided home-based primary care to elderly patients with significant morbidities. He has served on a number of committees at the university and belongs to several organizations, including the Hospice and Palliative Nurses Association, the American Nurses Association, and the Gerontological Society of America. He is also a member of the Nightingales, a tobacco control nurse activist group.


2. @AbbieCitron Abbie Citron, RN, is a certified legal nurse consultant who draws on 15 years of critical care nursing experience plus specialized training to consult on medical-related cases. She owns Citron & Associates Legal Nurse Consulting in Los Angeles and is a member of the National Alliance of Certified Legal Nurse Consultants and the American Association of Legal Nurse Consultants. She specializes in medical malpractice, personal injury, product liability, and any type of law involving health or injury— assessing injuries, interpreting medical records, preparing reports, locating expert witnesses, and more. She’ll even accompany attorneys’ clients to their defense medical exams, to prepare the injured client and act as a nurse advocate.


3. @AdeneB Adene Balzer, RN, LNC, began her nursing career in pediatrics and spent 25 years as a neonatal intensive care nurse. She developed and implemented the criteria, guidelines, and practices for two neonatal developmental follow-up clinics. She also has experience in adult home health care, HIV/AIDS care, hospice, travel nursing, and staffing for a nursing agency. She lives in St. Louis, Mo., and works with As Translations Go, a company that provides translations, transcriptions, and interpreting services for legal cases, including medical ones.


4. @Procarenurse Alisa Pallister, RN, is a life care planner, home health case manager, and nurse consultant who has worked across the continuum of care (in acute care, long-term care, and outpatient settings) for more than 15 years. She owns and operates Procare Nurse Consulting, based in Portland, Ore., which provides home health care management and life care plans. She enjoys seeing clients in their own homes, where she can give full attention to their individual needs.


5. @Nursefriendly Andrew Lopez, RN, operates Nursefriendly Inc., an extensive online listing of nursing and health care resources and works part-time in subacute rehab in southern New Jersey. His days revolve around expanding the directory to cover more health care and entrepreneur topics, helping nurse entrepreneurs get started online, and watching his daughter, Autumn, grow. You can follow Nursefriendly on Facebook.

If you know of nurses who are worthy of attention on these pages, please tweet your recommendation to @organizedwisdom in this format: “I recommend @[username] as a top nurse for @OrganizedWisdom,” or use our contact form.

Other blog entries featuring patient experts or health professionals:

Featured Obstetrician-Gynecologists, Part 1
Featured Chiropractors, Part 1
Featured Neurologists, Part 1
Featured Cardiologists, Part 1, Part 2
Featured Dietitians, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
Featured Nutritionists, Part 1, Part 2
Featured Nurses, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
Featured Nurses, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11
Featured Oncologists, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
Top Nephrologists on Twitter
Top Gastroenterologists on Twitter 
Gluten-Free Diet Feature 
Type 1 Diabetes Patient Experts, Part 1, Part 2 

By Julie Bohlen, MBA-HCM, ELS

Creating Order Out of Chaos, Helping People Find the Best Resources

The OrganizedWisdom Expert Curation Platform and How it Works

With the launch of a series of new features we've quietly rolled out over the summer, OrganizedWisdom has laid the foundation for an advanced Expert Curation Platform that already features nearly 5,000 experts in the health, wellness, and lifestyle sector.

As our tagline (great links, shared by experts, organized by topic) suggests, OrganizedWisdom is on a mission to organize the world's best resources and we are doing so with the help of a community of expert curators.

While we are only at the beginning phases of achieving our vision, we were super pleased with this comment from visionary health tech investor, Esther Dyson, (who is one of our investors and advisors) who recently described OrganziedWisdom as "creating order out of chaos...helping people find the best and most reliable resources."

But how do we create order out of chaos? Since so many have asked about our new system, we thought it would be helpful to share how the process works...

Simply put, experts share great links about millions of health, wellness and lifestyle topics every day.  We filter, organize and package these links into "social digests" we call WisdomCards.  Then we publish and distribute WisdomCards everywhere via our site, search engines, blogs and other sites.

While the quick overview of the way it works may sound simple, the technology platform and process we have spent the last three years building and optimizing is quite complex. Here's a bit more detail about our process.

First, we review and approve experts who share great links online and we provide them with curation tools designed to grow their reach, influence, and business online.  We take great care with who is approved to become an expert curator.  And we routinely filter out experts who no longer meet our quality standards.

We then organize and filter the ongoing stream of millions of shared links and organize them into Wisdomcards - social digests that group the very best resources and information on a particular topic.  Because expert curators continue to share new links, these WisdomCards continue to get better every day.

One of the key steps in our process is how we rank the quality of each expert and each shared resource to help filter up high quality content and guide people to the very best information.  To do this, we created an advanced quality algorithm called the WisdomScore and have made this score transparent on each WisdomCard (more about the WisdomScore here). 

Finally, we publish and distribute WisdomCards on OrganizedWisdom.com, via search engines, on blogs, and on other sites. (Sneak peak: and as we are about to launch this week, WisdomCards will soon be social objects designed so anyone can embed and share them with people they think will benefit from the information).

If you're interested in helping solve this problem with us and to find out how you can become approved to become expert curator click here.

The Solution for the Enormous Problem of Filter Failure: Expert Curation

Every day more and more stuff gets added to the content pile of the Web.  Billions and billions of new articles, posts, tweets, updates, slideshares, videos, images, link recommendations, comments, and so on get added to the mass of information in an ever-growing heap waiting to be discovered and hopefully put to good use.  

The good news is that much of this content is very useful and people have more access to great information than ever before.  The bad news is it is now more difficult than ever to sort through this content mess to find the very best information.

As NYU professor and best-selling author, Clay Shirky, outlines in the brilliant speech to the Web 2.0 audience in the video below, there is a major challenge brewing, and it isn't merely information overload as a result of even more content being created everyday.  The real problem is with filter failure.

As you might assume for obvious reasons, filter failure becomes an even bigger concern when dealing with something as important as health information.  It's one thing to get a lot of junk, spam, and untrustworthy information mixed in with your gossip news or travel reviews.  It's entirely more serious when your health and wellness may be on the line and high quality information is essential.

So how are people supposed to find the good information online when it is mixed in with so much clutter, and the machine filters (aka machine search engines) we have all been using for the last decade just aren't keeping up?

We believe the answer is Expert Curation.

At OrganizedWisdom we've been working for three years on a solution for the enormous challenge of filter failure and at its core is this simple premise: 

We believe that by layering the collaborative wisdom of experts into the filtering process and combining human knowledge and expertise with exceptional technology, OrganizedWisdom can make a profound impact on how high quality information gets filtered up and distributed to help people cut through the clutter and chaos of digital content. 

As we posted last week, by providing the platform that leverages experts' wisdom to help organize the world's best information, we are creating an "Expert Graph" (instead of just a social graph of your friends, colleagues, etc.) that you will be able to count on when you truly need to cut through the clutter and find quality information you can trust.

We're at the nascent stages of tapping the potential of this expert curation platform, but with nearly 5,000 experts already helping curate the best resources for health, wellness, and lifestyle content we have the foundations for a filter failure solution in place.  Now it's just about continuing to execute and scale the system.

If you're interested in helping solve this problem with us and to find out how you can become approved to become expert curator click here.

Featured Oncologists, Part 3

The following oncologists represent some of the best minds in the field. Working from highly regarded cancer treatment centers around the country, they have dedicated their lives to caring for those struggling with this devastating disease. View their OrganizedWisdom profiles below:

1. @DrRAgajanian Richy Agajanian, MD, is head physician at the Oncology Institute of Hope & Innovation in Downey, California. Dr. Agajanian is triple board-certified by the American Board of Medical Oncology, the American Board of Hematology, and the American Board of Internal Medicine. He has researched and published several articles in medical journals on the topic of hematology and oncology, including treatment of Burkitt lymphoma, development of a scoring system for myelodysplastic syndromes, and the study of acute chest syndrome. Dr. Agajanian is fluent in English, Spanish, and Armenian.


2. @DrLen Len Lichtenfeld, MD, is deputy chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society, and he directs the society’s Cancer Control Science Department, which produces widely recognized guidelines for the prevention and early detection of cancer and guidelines for nutrition and physical activity for cancer survivors. Dr. Lichtenfeld is a frequent spokesperson on a variety of cancer-related subjects and serves as a liaison for the ACS with many professional and public organizations. Dr. Len's Cancer Blog (hosted by the ACS) is a must-read for everyone interested in the disease.


3. @DrWestGRACE H. Jack West, MD, is a medical oncologist and the founder, president, and CEO of Global Resource for Advancing Cancer Education (GRACE). Dr. West is also medical director of the Thoracic Oncology Program, Swedish Cancer Institute, in Seattle. He has been actively involved with the SWOG Lung Cancer Committee on multiple recent and ongoing protocols, and he leads several investigator-initiated trials at his own institution. In 2007, Dr. West was named one of the Best Doctors in Seattle by his regional medical colleagues.


4. @JanCernyMDPhD Jan Cerny, MD, PhD, is an assistant professor of medicine at University of Massachusetts Medical School. Dr. Cerny practices at the UMass Memorial Medical Center. His clinical interests include leukemia, lymphoma and other hematological malignancies, and stem cell biology and transplantation. He is fluent in Czech, German, and Russian.


5. @krupali Krupali Tejura, MD, is a radiation oncologist, patient advocate, writer, scuba diver, traveler, music lover, TEDster, dreamer, sports enthusiast, and believer. Dr. Tejura practices medicine at the Wilshire Oncology Medical Group. She believes that the impossible is possible. Her lovely Web site, Krupali.com, is definitely worth visiting! Linger a while--you'll soon be enthralled by Krupali's love of life and passion for her patients.

If you know of someone who is worthy of our Top Doctor Awards, please tweet your recommendation to @organizedwisdom in this format: "I recommend @[username] as a top doctor for @OrganizedWisdom," or use our contact form.

Other blog entries featuring patient experts or health professionals:

Featured Obstetrician-Gynecologists, Part 1
Featured Chiropractors, Part 1
Featured Neurologists, Part 1
Featured Cardiologists, Part 1, Part 2
Featured Dietitians, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
Featured Nutritionists, Part 1, Part 2
Featured Nurses, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
Featured Nurses, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11
Featured Oncologists, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
Top Nephrologists on Twitter
Top Gastroenterologists on Twitter 
Gluten-Free Diet Feature 
Type 1 Diabetes Patient Experts, Part 1, Part 2 

By Julie Bohlen, MBA, ELS

 

WNYAD559ZN3E

 

 

 

 

New Drugs Approved Summer 2010

New drugs not only offer hope, but possibly a better quality of life, for those awaiting new treatments. However, new drug approvals can also spark controversy. The FDA approved 17 new drugs this summer (June-August 2010). Many offer new promise, and one in particular promises a great deal of future debate.

Since nearly one in three Americans has high blood pressure, it isn't surprising that two of the 17 newly approved drugs are antihypertensives. The most recently approved drug is Tekamlo (aliskiren and amlodipine) from Novartis, a single-pill combination drug for high blood pressure. Tribenzor is a new three-in-one combination drug that is taken once-daily to treat high blood pressure.  

The most controversial newly approved drug is the emergency contraceptive ella (ulipristal acetate) that can prevent pregancy for up to 5 days after sex.  Plan B, the so-called morning after pill, is less effective and can only be used within 3 days of having sex. ella has been available as ellaOne in Europe since May 2009 and will be available to US women this fall.

Many are against the FDA approval of ella as a contraceptive when it can be used to induce abortion. Representative Chris Smith (R-NJ) says this classification may pave the way to “covertly allow federal funding for abortion." (1)  Supporters and opponents agree this approval highlights the increasing influence of the FDA on political ideology and will be entangled with future political and regulatory battles.

A promising new drug, Cuvposa (glypopyrrolate), is the first liquid treatment for children who suffer from chronic severe drooling associated with neurologic conditions such as cerebral palsy. The FDA reports that 78% of children on this drug reached clinical improvement during trials. 

The 17 new drugs approved this summer with their indications are listed in Figure 1. New drugs for asthma (Dulera), enlarged prostate (Jalyn), migraine (Alsuma), osteoporosis (Prolia), acne (Veltin), and erectile dysfunction (Staxyn) are a sampling of 2010 FDA approvals.  

Figure 1: FDA Newly Approved Drugs Summer 2010 (June-August) 

Drug	Approval 2010	Company	Indication
Tekamlo (aliskiren and amlodipine)	August 26	Novartis Pharmaceuticals	Hypertension
ella (aliskiren and amiodipine)	August 13	HRA Pharma	Postcoital Contraception - emergency contraception
Suprep (sodium sulfate, potassium sulfate, magnesium sulfate)  - Oral	August 5	Braintree Laboratories	Bowel Preparation – cleansing colon prior to colonoscopy
Xeomin (incobotulinumtoxinA)	July 30	Merz Pharmaceuticals	Cervical Dystonia, Blepharospasm
Cuvposa (glycopyrrolate) Oral Solution	July 28	Shionogi Pharma, Inc	Chronic Drooling in Children
Lastacaft (alcaftadine) Ophthalmic Solution	July 28	Vistakon Pharmaceuticals	Allergic Conjunctivitis - itchy eyes associated with eye allergies
Tribenzor (amlodipine, hydrochlorothiazide and olmesartan) Tabs	July 23	Daiichi Sankyo, Inc.	Hypertension – once-daily treatment
Veltin (clindamycin and tretinoin) Gel - formerly Velac	July 16	Stiefel Laboratories, Inc.	Acne - antibiotic and retinoid for topical treatment of acne
Zuplenz (ondansetron) Oral Soluble Film	July 2	Strativa Pharmaceuticals	Prevention of Chemotherapy-Induced, Radiotherapy-Induced, and Postoperative Nausea and Vomiting
Glassia (alpha1-proteinase inhibitor Injection) - formerly AAT-IV	July 1	Kamada Ltd.	Alpha-1 Proteinase Inhibitor Deficiency – in adults with emphysema
Butrans (buprenorphine) Transdermal System	June 30	Purdue Pharma L.P.	Pain – management of moderate to severe chronic pain
Alsuma (sumatriptan) Injection	June 29	King Pharmaceuticals	Migraine, Cluster Headache
Dulera (mometasone furoate and formoterol fumarate) Inhaler	June 22	Merck & Co.	Asthma – in people 12 years of age and older
Staxyn (vardenafil) Orally Disintegrating Tablets	June 17	GlaxoSmithKline and Merck & Co.	Erectile Dysfunction
Jevtana (cabazitaxel) Injection	June 17	Sanofi-Aventis	Prostate Cancer - in combination with prednisone for hormone-refractory metastatic prostate cancer
Jalyn (dutasteride and tamsulosin) Capsules	June 14	GlaxoSmithKline	Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia – in men with enlarged prostate
Prolia (denosumab) Injection	June 1	Amgen Inc.	Osteoporosis – in women at high risk for fracture

      (1). Stein, Rob. FDA approves ella as a 5-day-after emergency contraceptive. The Washington Post. August 14, 2010. 

Past blog entries on trending health topics on OrganizedWisdom or popular health searches on the Web:

Popular Celebrity Cancer Searches for August 2010 
10 Healthiest Foods 
10 Trending Health Topics...Hot Off the Press 
5 Trending Health Topics: Health Questions You're Too Afraid to Ask 
10 Trending Health Searches: Crisis-Everywhere-You-Turn Edition (April 26-May 2) 
5 Trending Health Topics: Healthy Skin Edition

By Julie Bohlen, MBA/HCM, ELS

http://www.blogcatalog.com/directory/lifestyle/health/

 

Best Blogs

Blog Directory

SEO services provided by Search Engine Optimization
Add blog to our blog directory.

Introducing OrganizedWisdom's New Platform To Connect Experts' Wisdom to People Who Need It

Over the past several months the team at OrganizedWisdom has been hard at work building a completely new and improved platform designed to better connect experts and their wisdom with those who need it.  Over the coming weeks we will be sharing details about the new features, and how they will benefit visitors, our community of experts and brands with you here first.

Organizing Wisdom: Great Links Curated by Experts

Our big mission to leverage experts' wisdom to help organize the world's best information has remained constant since our very first version 3 years ago, but the platform we are building at OrganizedWisdom is a complete transformation that we believe will have a profound impact on how high quality information gets filtered up and distributed to help people cut through the clutter and chaos of Web content.

For the past several months we've been quietly launching dozens of major innovations and a new platform to transform OrganizedWisdom into a curation and promotion platform for experts and brands in the health, wellness, and lifestyle sector to grow their reach, influence and business online. 

OrganizedWisdom has already built a powerful curation engine for high quality health, wellness and lifestyle content with over 200,000 WisdomCards (social digests/links organized by topic), nearly 5,000 Expert Curators featured, and more than 2,000,000 resources shared and organized to date.  Over the coming weeks, we will introduce the new OrganizedWisdom platform in stages, but for those who follow our blog and Twitter streams you will see what's coming first.

We're very much in the beginning stages of executing on our full vision, and we look forward to sharing a much improved service for our expert curator community and those who need their wisdom.  As always we welcome your feedback and suggestions.