DoubleCheckMD November 27, 2008
Posted by admin in : Health Tools , add a comment
Another consumer-oriented concept. This one is specifically for patients on multiple medications who are curious to find out how they interact and what side-effects are related to which.
DoubleCheckMD is an offering by a Cambridge, MA-based company called Enhanced Medical Decisions, founded by a physician from Harvard. It provides information around drug-drug interaction (including OTC, Vitamins and Herbs) and drug-symptom relation with the caveat “Please note that the information DoubleCheckMD.com provides is intended to help individuals to work with their medical professionals and is for educational purposes only. It does not constitute medical or healthcare advice and serves to supplement, not substitute for, the expertise and judgment of a healthcare professional.” Fair enough. I guess its more of a technology showcase currently, so I wont go into my ‘what is the business model’ rant.
Drug interaction can be an important aspect of care for patients taking multiple drugs, but I’m not convinced it is ready for prime time as an end-user (consumer) tool. Technologies like this are best served as a part of an overall patient portal offering or PHR.
ReliefInsite November 7, 2008
Posted by admin in : Health Records , add a comment
Pain is a subjective symptom that is often hard to correctly diagnose and treat on long-term basis. It’s the focus of ReliefInsite- an online web diary for patients with chronic pain. The idea is first to provide a simple platform to record and store pain-related data and provide easy-to-interpret analysis to patients. Secondly, this enables a longitudinal insight for providers into the key medical details that can help their on-going pain treatment.
The functionality includes a neat body map (screenshot below), notes and basic reporting. The business model includes a premium service (starting at $6.95 for 1 month) that exapnds the list of features to symptoms, reminders, advanced reports etc.
The concept falls in the realm of ‘disease management‘ solutions and is shows what future Healthcare IT solutions are going to be: specific and customized. An aggregation of tools like ReliefInsite can jumpstart a real PHR trend, one that is sustainable. Better still, this begs to be an application on the upcoming PHR platforms like Google Health and/or Microsoft Healthvault.
ClearSense September 26, 2008
Posted by admin in : Data Analysis , add a comment
Ever since Google and Microsoft jumped into it, the PHR (Personal Health Record) space has become red hot. So while PHRs try to move from hype phase to reality, startups like ClearSense are positioning themselves to leverage all those rich, complex details about your health.
ClearSense aims to help you make sense of your health information by providing the data analysis technology called REDBOX (developed at Bioinformatics Research Center at the Medical College of Wisconsin). I couldn’t find any information around what exactly makes REDBOX unique- it seems like it consists of data analysis models and algorithms that are optimized for health related data (although the devil is in the details for a technology like this). The company behind both of them is Point One Systems, which seems to have spun off from the Research Center.
The sample reports look Web 2.0-ish, with simple interface and layout. The actionable items and alerts are clearly outlined along with tips and educational material. I dont have enough health information in my Google Health account (fortunately I’m in the pink of health) so there was not point in taking ClearSense for a spin on my info.
Although there is minimal info about ClearSense’s unique selling point, the overall concept may actually prove to be useful if/when PHRs take off in future. Hopefully, ClearSense will survive to see that day.
SimulConsult August 16, 2008
Posted by admin in : Decision Support , add a comment
SimulConsult is a diagnostic decision support system started by Dr.Michael Segal. It covers 1,800 diseases that have at least one neurological finding in them.
SimulConsult has an interesting logic behind it. Roughly speaking, its knowledge is derived from a ‘computational wiki’ that is restricted to physician users only. So its database is not only open for viewing, but users can submit modifications to the database. The system performs bayesian pattern matching and also considers temporal information like the age of onset and disappearance of each finding for each disease under consideration.
According to Dr.Segal, there are about 33,000 data points (disease findings) in the system and the future expansion plans are to include more of metabolism and genetic diseases. Interestingly, the wiki approach for knowledge gathering in healthcare is becoming more common (AskDrWiki, WikiDoc, wikiMD to note a few- more on them later).
SpineConnect June 24, 2008
Posted by admin in : Communities , add a comment
SpineConnect is a knowledge networking site for spine surgeons to collaborate and support each other on difficult cases. It is the first offering from Syndicom, an online services company focused on communication and collaboration platform for the orthopedic industry.
Since its launch in early 2006, SpineConnect has gathered 1174 members from 38 countries with a knowledge base of over 900 cases and 4200 reviews (June 2008 data). I’m not sure about their business model, but it has to do with facilitating partnerships to bring innovative spine surgery ideas to market.
My personal belief is that general social networking websites loose their value with scale- there needs to be a common passion among members for the community to thrive. SpineConnect is a good example of a narrow focus community discussing treatment, challenges, outcomes, research and new technologies for a very specific field. All the more better for targeted advertisements :-). The future of networking is niche… at least in healthcare.
Medscape Physician Connect June 24, 2008
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Physician Connect is a new community area on Medscape that allows physicians to securely engage online with other physicians in discussions on clinical as well as non-clinical topics that are relevant to the practice of medicine. The site was launched early this year, and is claimed to have gathered 20,000 registrants since (according to their Q1 FY08 Earnings Call Transcript). I guess that is enough for them to call themselves “…the largest online community of physicians and healthcare professionals today”. Why bother with modesty or proof.
The business idea is to mine the community generated data and monetize it by letting sponsors directly participate and gain real-time insights into physician attitudes and perceptions. They provide online CME (free), journal articles and news/meetings/conference coverage. The standard WebMD fare of Medscape Drug Reference, expert columns and interviews are included too.
Medstory June 19, 2008
Posted by admin in : Search Engines , add a comment
Medstory is a health information search engine that went into a public beta in mid 2006. In feb 2007, it was acquired by Microsoft. Their interface is pretty minimalistic, with only a search keyword box on the homepage. The results returned with an option to refine it in various categories like conditions, procedures, trials, articles etc. The google-like interaction and navigation reduces the noise that is usually associated with health related information search.
There isn’t much out there that explains the technology behind Medstory (except vague references to machine learning and AI, like in this CNET article). Anyway, it’s yet another addition to Microsoft Health Solution Group’s product portfolio that includes the enterprise health information system Amalga and the consumer-oriented Healthvault platform.
MEDgle June 18, 2008
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With a play on google’s name, MEDgle offers symptom based health information search. The idea is to ‘empower patients in their discussions with physicians’, by making relevant content easy to find.
The navigation is pretty simple and straightforward. MEDgle’s output is a probabilistic list of disease/conditions based on the user input. The content is authored by their 3-physician team and is based on publicly available information available such as the Center for Disease Control and National Institutes of Health. Where probability estimates were not available, they have used their own practice experience to fill in the gaps.
The need for a healthcare vertical search engine is widely realized, and like everything else, it opens up the ability for potential (ab)use with self-diagnosing hypochondriacs. Skepticism aside, I did a search using a common symptom (difficulty in walking, heel pain) and found it easy to navigate to a list of links and information around bone spur and plantar fasciitis. The “Related Local Doctors” section for finding local providers relevant for your symptoms is a neat idea too.
There is an obvious limit to the utility of such tools- Alexia Estabrook’s blogpost talks about MEDgle’s performance for a more complex query. Although that points to the Achilles heel of any diagnostic decision support system today; it’s hard to model the entire spectrum of disease-symptom relationship in an all-inclusive, 100% accurate way. It has more to do with the ever-expanding body of medical knowledge than the lack of technical prowess. That why medicine is a science and an art.
PS: You can read the interviews of some of MEDgle team members here and here.