Rochester, NY based Logical Images is the company behind VisualDx. Understandably enough, it was founded by two dermatologists from University of Rochester in 1999. At its core lies a pretty big repository of clinical images (they claim > 60K) that are tagged with clinical metadata like symptoms, location, history etc. A user can browse through diagnosis domains or input findings to reach a relevant set of images.

There is a 15-day trial for non-enterprise users, and individual subscription pricing ranges from $49.99 (Pediatric) to $99.99 (Adult) for a year. Student discounts brings it down to a very reasonable level ($29.99 and $49.99 respectively) in my view. The company has leveraged their content to create an online consumer health resource called Skinsight. Besides the clever name, I really liked their slick ‘Skin Condition Finder‘ tool. Overall, it’s a smart approach for gaining market recognition and expanding services.

The concept of Diagnostic Decision Support (DDS) often comes with the implicit notion of text-based query, so I really like the ‘visual’ DDS approach. Dermatology, Pathology are obvious choices to implement such an approach and situations like ER, bioterrorism, infectious diseases are prime contexts since there is not enough time to engage a pure text-based knowledge base. Also, some conditions are rare enough that most practicing physicians and non-specialists haven’t actually seen one in real life. Other factors like dark skin, atypical presentation can be confounding. It’s handy to have a this as a medical education tool and as a care delivery aid in facilities where specialists are not available all the time.

I’m bit surprised why it’s not a widely subscribed resource in hospitals, public health entities, medical education and general EMR vendor products. Anyway, it’d be interesting to see this visual content embedded in other consumer tools (like iTriage, FreeMD) and enterprise offerings (Isabel Healthcare, SimulConsult, Curbside.MD etc.). Wonder which firms are competitors for VisualDx today…

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.