HealthContentAdvisors

Archive for the ‘Image search’ Category

MedPage Today Adds Video Content to its Portfolio

• Posted April 6th 2008
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• by Marji

Medical news information provider MedPage Today is apparently taking its promise to provide content 24/7 very seriously. Last week, MedPage announced that it offered live video and on-demand coverage from the press conferences of the American College of Cardiology’s annual meeting in Chicago.

This wasn’t the first time that MedPage Today has done this. In February, the company launched its live video offering at the American Stroke Association’s 2008 annual meeting in New Orleans. The live and on-demand coverage from the meeting’s press conferences were broadcast on MedPage Today’s website (www.MedPageToday.com).

According to a press release announcing the video coverage, MedPage Today will continue to provide video of upcoming conferences for an audience of medical professionals that can view the coverage live or whenever is most convenient for them. To get the video online, MedPage Today staff feeds the press conference video to the company’s broadcast center, where it is added to the MedPage Today website.

Content comes in all forms. And technology now enables these forms to be easily presented in an online environment. It makes perfect sense for MedPage Today to do this. The company already provides 24/7 coverage of medical news as well as medical education credits for physicians and other clinicians.

In one regard, it’s almost surprising that it’s taken this long for such an offering to emerge. As long as audience members and conference organizers find value is this type of feature, it will most likely continue–and perhaps become a larger part of MedPage Today’s business. If that happens, information providers in other industries may take notice and launch similar offerings for their particular segments.

 

Technology + Content Is a Winning Formula

• Posted February 12th 2008
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• by Janice

Gordon Crovitz, former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, highlighted five trends in the information industry at last month’s SIIA IIS conference in New York. Among the five, he stated that “software and information are most powerful together”.

That’s the mantra InfoCommerce Group has been promoting for years, and one which by now should be obvious to anyone who has been using computers for decades to analyze data and search for content in online networks. There have been great advances in using technology to enhance value of textual data through wider use of taxonomies, automated entity extraction utilities, and search engines and ranking systems that rely on the underlying technology to improve the search experience for the user. More recently, we’re seeing wider-spread integration of content into the business process or work routine of professionals to increase their productivity and quality of their output.

With data and textual content under control, one of the next innovations will be in enhancing the value of image and video content. Wolters Kluwer’s recent investment in Logical Images, a digital imaging company that has applied taxonomies to their collection of images in their VisualDx system to allow searches to be carried out by descriptions of symptoms, not just by disease or condition, offers an example. The combination of searchable clinical content from Wolters Kluwer and searchable images from Logical Images creates what the press release calls an “easy online clinical decision support system”. 

According to the press release, “Together, Clin-eguide and VisualDx provide an unmatched clinical decision solution. We avoid using the term “solutions” to describe combinations of content and technology since the combined offering is rarely a standalone solution. But there is no doubt that improved productivity does result from the appropriate application of knowledge management principles and software to information, whether it be data, textual content, sound, images or video content. And, now that process improvement through IT is the mantra of the healthcare industry, we look forward to many more alliances between software companies and publishers that want to produce a winning formula for healthcare professionals by combining technology + content.