Medify
Scientific and medical research has seen explosive growth in the past few decades. Since 1996, the United States National Library of Medicine (NLM) has maintained PubMed, a free portal providing access to references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. PubMed now has over 21 million citations going back to 1966, and continues to add a staggering amount (about 500,000 new...
Read MoreHealthline
Usually I’m wary of putting time into big-budget health portals, but San Francisco based Healthline deserves a mention. They have a portfolio of healthcare search, navigation and content that is syndicated through a growing network of big web properties like AARP, Health.com, iVillage, AOL etc. Healthline was founded in 1999 as YourDoctor.com and was re-launched as Healthline Networks in...
Read MoreVitals
Vitals is a physician search and rating destination. The fact that we need such tools is indisputable, although there are a plethora of sites that claim to have this ability now (DrScore, RateMDs, HealthcareReviews, HealthGrades, DoctorScorecard to name a few) . Which is part of the reason why none of them is successful enough to be the ultimate source of such information. Board certification,...
Read MoreZocDoc
ZocDoc is a free service that allows patients to book Doctor appointments online in New York City. It started in September 2007 as a service to help people find and make dentist appointments in NYC, and has now includes other specialties too (like primary care, dermatologist, ENT, ortho, OB/GYN, allergist, podiatrist, etc.) Patients get to use the site for free- looking up physicians that...
Read MoreAmericanWell
While the conventionalists argue otherwise, there is some truth to the fact that plenty of health conditions can be taken care of without actually seeing the patient in-person. Based on that assumption, AmericanWell offers an interactive service that lets patients talk to a physician in real time, anytime. The service went live in January this year and initially focusing on Hawaii. The basic...
Read MoreOrganizedWisdom
OrganizedWisdom describes itself as the first human-powered, doctor-guided search service for health. What the site promises to provide are noise-free, simple but organized search pages that list relevant information on health topics. Its a crowdsourcing model at heart- these pages are essentially hand-crafted search results aggregated by OrganizedWisdom Guides and Physician Reviewers (eligible...
Read MoreMedstory
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...
Read MoreMEDgle
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...
Read MoreCurbside.MD
Curbside.MD is a search engine for finding evidence based clinical information. The idea is to type in the search need as a natural language question that a clinician would normally ask his/her colleague, and get relevant answers from the literature (articles, images, guidelines, etc.) I took it for a test drive with a moderately complex question (‘what is the indication for platelet...
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