ResearchBuzz

There’s a new Web site devoted to bringing together community-level practices for dealing with public health emergencies. At the moment that site has over 130 practices from four countries, 22 states, and 33 counties. It’s available at PandemicPractices.org .

You can browse by states which have made information available, or you can browse by category. Categories include Triage Strategies, Risk Communications, and Community Engagement. I took a look at Surge Capacity.

There were a series of plans from several states and countries, including one for extended child care, one for medical coordination and care delivery process, and one for training, drills, and exercises. Each plan has not only a set of component parts (some more extensive than others) but also a description and comments from reviewers. This paragraph-or-so serves as a combination executive summary and minireview. The ones I looked at gave me a good overview of what’s available in the plan, its weak points, and how it might be used/adapted.

The State of New Jersey has launched a Web site that allows its citizens to compare prices for 150 drugs at pharmacies across the state. You can try it at https://www6.state.nj.us/LPSCA_DRUG/index.jsp .

To search, you’ll need to specify a medication type (the 150 most-prescribed drugs are available), its strength, and a city or zip code. I searched for 250 MG Amoxicillin capsules in Trenton.

The results provided a list of costs, both by unit and for x number of capsules in a prescription. I saw prices as low s 34 cents each and as high as 60 cents each. The price results also include the name and address of the pharmacy and the date the prescription was filled. From the results page you can also look for different strengths/dosages for the same drug as well as follow links to general information about the drugs. I was surprised about the wide variety of prices for the drug. Useful.

If you’re interested in researching medical conditions, this might be a good place for you to spend a little time. The Visual Medical Dictionary takes your search for a medical term, gives you a definition and provides you with even more terms.

An example is order. Start at the medical dictionary at http://www.curehunter.com/public/dictionary.do and enter a drug, disease, or therapy name. I tried shingles. I got two potential results — one for a disease and one for a drug (a vaccine). When I held my mouse over each word, I got a definition and some additional information. But even cooler is what I got on the right side of the screen.

The right side of the screen gives you a visual tree of medical terms related to the word you specified. Some of these words are WAY too general to be useful (like “pain”) but some of them are very specific. Each of the new items will also give you a definition and will branch out into its own tree of definitions.

Just playing with this site for a little while I was able to quickly amass a vocabulary around which I could build queries for a disease. Now, if you want to do an in-depth search, you can subscribe to the subscription service that will give you a lot more details and research. But that’ll cost you $490 a year. I think I’ll just take the words I learn about here and bring them directly to Google or PubMed…