The ides has potential. GPS-based real-time meal recommendations based on your daily intake requirements and goals can be a simple way to stick to healthy eating habits. Webdiet also has a feature where you can order your meal in advance through your mobile device. Not sure about their coverage though- feature like these need to have granular, wide geographical coverage before they can be found useful by users. Maybe we will see some social networking features in future (who is eating what in your network? Geez..).

They are currently in invite-only beta, but have plans to launch on a freemium model early 2009 (so you can join and get basic service for free, but it’ll cost you to upgrade to a preimum service with more features).

What sets it apart from the usual networking websites is their business model (plus the fact that its aptly explained on a dedicated page) . Within3 is free to individual professionals, and earns revenue by selling software licenses to health and life science organizations who wish to establish online communities inside the platform. There are some nice examples of communities built on their platform- like med school alumni website, medical associations, etc.

The web-based tool lets you create a complete family medical history including the closest family members and others like aunts, uncles, nieces, and nephews. Users can print this organized family history information and for their family doctor, save to their own computer (*htm format) or share it with other family members (and let them contribute to it too). One can save partial effort and then reload the *htm back at a later time to complete. Same goes for importing it into PHRs or electronic medical records maintained by health organizations.

Knowing a family medical history is important in screening for a great number of conditions (cardiovascular disease; type 2 diabetes; hypertension; osteoporosis; breast cancer, colorectal cancer to name a few).  The tool is a useful public awareness tool, no doubt. Perhaps it can spawn something like ancestry.com to let users collaborate and analyze this in a connected community manner. That would enable some fantastic research like manifestation of cancers across several generation and siblings or atavism in general.

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.

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 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 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).

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.

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 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.