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 2005. It’s got some deep-pocket investors behind it (Aetna, NBCU, Kaiser Permanente, Reed Elsevier, US News & World Report to name a few) so I’m not surprised that they have managed to create (what they call as) ‘Consumer Healthcare Taxonomy’ of >1 million terms and 250K medical concepts. That is what powers their proprietary ability to organize and present contextually-relevant health information to a viewer. Personally I dont think much of it, given that there are plenty of precursors in the medical ontology area (SNOMED, UMLS…) that match this feat.

So Healthline can power health search in multiple ways (symptom, treatment, doctor, drug) and help consumers navigate to the right information. They have also branched out into health-specific ad network, PHR etc. Regardless, I’m interested in mentioning Healthline because of their excellent 3D Body Maps. They have a neat library of 3D animations that lets you partially control and understand body structure and function. Much like CareFlash. Development of these consumer-oriented educational health content repositories is a positive trend, although it’d be much nicer if all these individual attempts were cataloged in one place, giving a complete guide to educational 3D health and wellness content on the web. Like what Clicker does for Internet television.

In general, I really like the idea of using personal mobile computing devices in treating/preventing chronic conditions. As devices and sensors get smarter and cheaper, it’s logical that they start playing role in helping individuals deal with chronic, lifestyle affecting conditions like migraines, sleep disorders, allergies, dysmenorrhea, depression etc.

Proactive Sleep provides a ’smart alarm clock’ for iPhone/iPod Touch. Some features: customize what music to fall asleep to, and to wake up with, a dynamic ‘vigilance game’ that you need to complete to turn the alarm off, and a sleep diary to note your observations and sleeping habits. Nothing earth-shattering there. The features may be simple, and its not my intention to critique Proactive Sleep per se. What I want to emphasize is that applications like these are a step in the right direction overall.

For a number of chronic disorders with no established cause (like migraines, insomnia), keeping an accurate log (diary) can be extremely useful for prevention and treatment. Integrating such ‘digital diary’ into daily lifestyle can be much more convenient and smart way of keeping track of such conditions. Proactive Sleep is a bit too manual, in my opinion (e.g. you need to document everything in your sleep diary yourself). What would be awesome is to combine it with a smart sensor (like the FitBit) to automatically record your sleep habits. That way its even more Health 2.0.

RememberItNow is an online medication reminder service. Once you enter the pill information (what, when) it can send email/text reminder messages at the right time. Also included are some features around access control , scheduling, charting, journal etc.

The site was inspired by a true story, and I agree that we can do better by utilizing web technology for medication adherence. But I’m not sure if there is a need for a devoted web service just around medication reminders. They are currently in beta so all services are free, but looks like they will offer paid accounts once they are out of beta.

Reminder functionality is best served as a part of a bigger PHR platform (like Google Health) and in most cases, there are generic substitutes available. For example, why not use 30Boxes or Reqall or even your Google Calendar instead of paying monthly subscription? All of these are capable of sending reminders at a preset time. Medication reminders is an important issue, but emails/text is not going to be the complete answer imho. Especially given the fact that most of the people having trouble remembering are in an age group where emails/text are not the choice of communication anyway. That is why devices like ePill exist.

CareFlash has an interesting take on social networking for patients. It lets you create a private, secure website to inform and update your family/friends about your medical condition- an online ‘community’ of sorts. Good concept. Having an invite-only, private community helps everyone to stay current with latest developments about the health of someone they love, without everyone calling and visiting all the time. They have some neat features like a shared calendar, email alerts, forums etc.

The crown jewel offering is the educational content- they have 3D medical animations around a long list of conditions. These are meant to help patients and relatives better understand the medical condition. The content is developed by another company (Blausen Medical) and is high-quality, professional grade. I reviewed some of the videos and found them quite useful.

Its been around since 2007 and gets substantial visitors- around 2K+ per month. The site is completely free, and one of the press releases points to their business model “CareFlash is completely free to our users because select industries value having their advertisements tastefully and unobtrusively displayed in the circumstances on which each unique community is based.” Although I didn’t see any ads next to the videos I saw.

CureTogether was started in July 2008 as a way for patients to aggregate their anonymous medical data into an open-source database that can be used by any researcher in the world. They started with three conditions – migraine, endometriosis, and vulvodynia but now count more than 400 on their radar.

There are plenty of precedents to social networking websites for patients, so nothing new from that perspective. But as I read more about this one, it stood apart. The idea of a patient collective focusing on obscure, lifestyle-affecting, painful, chronic and under-researched diseases  and making their raw data available is pretty cool. This WSJ article talks about trend of ‘Personal Informatics’ emerging- where affected individuals obsessively record everything about their life and share it with others. This may usually sound useless and weird, but given the fact that there is no definitive causal understanding of conditions like migraine (even though it affects millions of Americans each year), I find it novel and exciting.

I like this bottom-up, organic approach to furthering research on obscure conditions. Their call for Open-Source Health Research is also an interesting read.  Bit worried by the fact that CureTogether is self-funded. Hopefully they will stay around long enough to claim a large-scale success for one of the diseases.

Nothing new here. Ozmosis is based on the now-old concept of physician networking website, with features like knowledge exchange, journal club, cases, alerts, news etc. Looking at dataopedia, they don’t have much traction either (roughly 1K visitors per month).

Although I’d always like to write about novel ideas, exceptions like these are purely from a record-keeping perspective. I’m trying to get a rough list of how many different takes of social networking for clinical professionals are currently floating around on the web.

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, address, affiliations, publications, education etc. are all public information anyway (albeit in obscure hard-to-find databases that are generally out of scope for a normal patient). Its the subjective rating and candid feedback from actual patients that is hard to find. The fact that there are multiple places claiming to be the repository of such ratings is not helping the situation.

Ranting aside, I like the user-friendliness of this site- very easy to navigate and see relevant information. They also do a good job of digging up public information from various sources and aggregate it all in a as-comprehensive-as-possible profile. Was also impressed by the fact that they have a healthy growth in traffic (now more than half a million unique’s every month, according to Compete).

Given the fact that potential users perhaps value ratings/recommendations/comments from other patients most, the biggest issue with all such sites is how to validate such information. In my search for multiple doctors, user ratings were almost non-existent. But even if they were as abundant as on Amazon, how does one establish their authenticity? I was able to submit ratings on one doctor without submitting any proof that I was ever treated by him (in full disclosure, the rating didn’t show up right away so its not that simple apparently. For example, their FAQ page says you can only rate your doctor once a month). Not sure about their revenue model either, since its free for users. Regardless, this is a good site to bookmark, just for getting all the public information about your doctor in one place.

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 accept their insurance and setting up appointments with them. Apparently, physicians need to pay to join ZocDoc and their enter availability info. Given their recent start, focus on one metropolitan area, the monthly unique visitor count is significant (20K+ according to dataopedia).

Interesting idea overall, kind of OpenTable.com for clinical care. The fact that you can set up a guaranteed appointment with a care provider today is a great feature (hard to execute in all cases though). What blows me away is the backing they have- Khosla, Bezos and Benihoff! That has got to be the most incredible investment partner team I’ve seen so far in any small healthcare IT startup.