While much of the world today suffers from information overload, there are still places where information is scarce. And that scarcity sometimes costs people their lives.

In the maternity ward of Zanzibar’s largest public health facility, Mnazi Mmoja Hospital, patient data is listed on a dry-erase board. The information on the board consists of the number of women admitted, the type and severity of their conditions, and whether or not they survived.

Data sharing can improve clinical care and reduce errors during patient transfers, but who decides what pieces of information are shared? Is too much admission/discharge information worse than no information at all?

A panel of long-term care thought leaders discussed the limits of the current regulations and the challenges of identifying mission-critical data elements for admissions and discharges in a collaborative session at the National Association for the Support of Long Term Care (NASL) annual meeting this week in Nashville, Tennessee.

A recent Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology report provided some intriguing thoughts about the pressure facing chief information security officers (CISOs) to keep their organizations secure and how they are combating information and vendor solution overload.

Have you ever felt like there is so much material on a subject that you can’t understand it, let alone make decisions? There’s a name for this feelinginformation overload.

People receiving a cancer diagnosis often experience information overload. Donna Branson, director of Patient and Public Education at Huntsman Cancer Institute (HCI), explains, “If you Google the term breast cancer, you may get 44 million hits. It’s confusing, and not all of the information out there is credible.”

Pregnant women are so overwhelmed with messages about what to do and what not to do that many are tuning out. They keep boozing and smoking in alarming numbers and most make only minor modifications to their diet, the leading study of Australian womens’ health shows. Nearly 80 per cent of pregnant women drink alcohol, and 30 per cent of pregnant smokers keep smoking despite official health advice to quit while pregnant.

Does the endless stream of articles telling you of new and alarming risks to your health have you feeling anxious? Consider just a few of the latest: Common pain relievers raise your risk for heart attacks. Sitting too much can make you more likely to develop cancer. Drinking even one soda per day boosts your chance of diabetes.

Does the endless stream of articles telling you of new and alarming risks to your health have you feeling anxious? Consider just a few of the latest: Common pain relievers raise your risk for heart attacks. Sitting too much can make you more likely to develop cancer. Drinking even one soda per day boosts your chance of diabetes.

Medical research is essential for helping us learn more about the likelihood of disease and how to reduce those risks. But with so much health and medical news blaring at us from websites, newspapers, TV, Twitter, and our doctors, it’s almost impossible to make sense of it all. And sometimes the risks are overdramatized or misstated—or don’t apply to all of us. As a result, you may experience needless anxiety, undergo procedures or take medications you don’t need, and skip steps that would really benefit you.

With the proliferation and ubiquity of information and communication technologies (ICTs), it is becoming imperative for individuals to constantly engage with these technologies in order to get work accomplished. Academic literature, popular press, and anecdotal evidence suggest that ICTs are responsible for increased stress levels in individuals (known as technostress). However, despite the influence of stress on health costs and productivity, it is not very clear which characteristics of ICTs create stress. (more…)

One in four of over 1,300 managers surveyed, admitted to actually suffering ill health as a result of the amount of information they handle.

There is a widespread view held by health clinicians that their work effectiveness is impaired by ‘information overload.’ Building upon a previous work by Wilson, a review of the literature was undertaken to look for the evidence of this. It was found that the literature, particularly in the context of the clinical environment, was limited. (more…)