Margaret McCartney and colleagues argue that new models of evidence synthesis and shared decision making are needed to accelerate a move from guideline driven care to individualised care

Smartphone apps have the potential to transform the way the public manage their health and interact with health services, says Margaret McCartney, but regulation of medical apps has only just started

The UK government has signalled its support for rating sites with the decision to set up its own through the NHS Choices website. Neil Bacon (doi:) believes they provide essential feedback for doctors, but Margaret McCartney is concerned that the potential harms are still unclear

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Social media have made it harder to maintain a distinction between professional and personal lives. Margaret McCartney looks at the dangers

Telehospice (TH) utilizes telemedicine technology to provide care at the end of life. A bistate project was launched in 1998 to study the use of home-based telemedicine for routine hospice care. Videophones were deployed for telenursing visits and evaluations by social workers. In order to determine what proportion of home hospice visits could be performed using currently available telemedicine technology, we reviewed clinical records retrospectively for hospice nurse home visits. Clinical notes documenting home nursing visits were obtained from two large hospices, one based in Kansas, and the other in Michigan. Records were randomly selected for patients who received hospice nurse visits during the month of January 2000. The charts were reviewed for patient demographic information, patient assessments, teaching activities, and interventions. Five hundred ninety-seven nursing notes were analyzed using an 85-item coding instrument. After careful review of the records, the coders also made a subjective observation regarding the suitability of each visit for telemedicine. As part of this analysis, we found that 64.5% of home hospice nursing visits could be performed by telemedicine. Using TH, it is possible to reduce the number of in-person visits, thereby significantly decreasing the cost of providing hospice care.