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 MoreAlliance Health
There have been plenty of success stories of online networks that help aggregate individuals with a common interest in a health condition. PatientsLikeMe, MedHelp, DailyStrength, Sermo to name some. So it was only a matter of time before we saw a network of networks. Something that went beyond a online community with singular focus. Alliance Health offers services to create health-related social...
Read MoreApixio
With regulatory push for EHR adoption, there is an impending avalanche of healthcare data coming in the next few years. Some believe it’s already here. But data can come in different flavors: from the frighteningly common free text to loosely categorized documents to well structured messages. The less structure it has, more hard it becomes for a machine to understand the real meaning...
Read MoreCure Together
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...
Read More360Fresh
The US healthcare system has spent decades digitizing clinical documentation and records. Now that most of the data generated during a patient visit is capable of being stored in some electronic manner, the next logical question becomes ‘what do we do with this data?’. There are an increasing number of startups recently that attempt to answer that specific question. 360Fresh uses...
Read MoreArchimedes Model
David M. Eddy, MD, PhD is a legend when it comes to Evidence-Based Medicine. He coined the term in 1980s, actually. Being exceptionally skilled in mathematics, it was perhaps natural for him to apply it to medicine. The result is Archimedes Model- a mathematical simulation of the human physiology and how it interacts with healthcare interventions. At the heart of the model are a set of ordinary...
Read MoreFlutrends
Google.org’s flutrend is an attempt to model flu activity across US based on the search terms that Google.com users enter around flu symptoms, treatment etc. The underlying premise is that there is a relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people have flu symptoms. Think of it as a virtual public health surveillance proxy. If you are not convinced...
Read MoreHealthmap
Healthmap is a perfect example of what technology can do to adavnce healthcare information. It aggregates online media reports to enable infectious disease intelligence on a global level. Its a near real-time internet-based infectious disease surveillance that is free from political and geographical restraints. Healthmap extracts real-time information from more than 10,000 sites every hour and...
Read MoreMedscape Physician Connect
Physician Connect is a new community area on Medscape that allows physicians to securely engage online with other physicians in discussions on clinical as well as non-clinical topics that are relevant to the practice of medicine. The site was launched early this year, and is claimed to have gathered 20,000 registrants since (according to their Q1 FY08 Earnings Call Transcript). I guess that is...
Read MorePatientsLikeMe
PatientsLikeMe is a social networking site that enables patients to share information around disease conditions. It was started in 2004 by concerned family members of an individual with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease). Users can register for free and interact around eleven conditions: ALS/Motor Neuron Disease, Anxiety, Bipolar, Depression, HIV/AIDS, Multiple Sclerosis, OCD,...
Read MoreSermo
Sermo is a free online community restricted to verified US physicians. It was founded in 2006 by Daniel Palestrant. Although its not the only one in this niche, Sermo has managed to get plenty of press and continuous funding ($3m in 2006, followed by $9.5m and $26.7m in 2007). So what is special about Sermo? For one, it has been forming all the right partnerships. Take its alliance with the...
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