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.
