DoubleCheckMD November 27, 2008
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Another consumer-oriented concept. This one is specifically for patients on multiple medications who are curious to find out how they interact and what side-effects are related to which.
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.
ReliefInsite November 7, 2008
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Pain is a subjective symptom that is often hard to correctly diagnose and treat on long-term basis. It’s the focus of ReliefInsite- an online web diary for patients with chronic pain. The idea is first to provide a simple platform to record and store pain-related data and provide easy-to-interpret analysis to patients. Secondly, this enables a longitudinal insight for providers into the key medical details that can help their on-going pain treatment.
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.
Medstory June 19, 2008
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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.
MEDgle June 18, 2008
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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 3-physician team and is based on publicly available information available such as the Center for Disease Control and National Institutes of Health. Where probability estimates were not available, they have used their own practice experience to fill in the gaps.
The need for a healthcare vertical search engine is widely realized, and like everything else, it opens up the ability for potential (ab)use with self-diagnosing hypochondriacs. Skepticism aside, I did a search using a common symptom (difficulty in walking, heel pain) and found it easy to navigate to a list of links and information around bone spur and plantar fasciitis. The “Related Local Doctors” section for finding local providers relevant for your symptoms is a neat idea too.
There is an obvious limit to the utility of such tools- Alexia Estabrook’s blogpost talks about MEDgle’s performance for a more complex query. Although that points to the Achilles heel of any diagnostic decision support system today; it’s hard to model the entire spectrum of disease-symptom relationship in an all-inclusive, 100% accurate way. It has more to do with the ever-expanding body of medical knowledge than the lack of technical prowess. That why medicine is a science and an art.
PS: You can read the interviews of some of MEDgle team members here and here.
MyDailyApple June 16, 2008
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MyDailyApple is the consumer oriented website started in 2006 by Praxeon, a life sciences company focusing on semantic search for healthcare information. It brings together medical news, research, blogs, and multimedia around a disease or condition for its users.
Besides searching for personalized health information in natural prose, MyDailyApple users can get relevant medical news and community opinions for their condition. It utilizes the same technology as Curbside.MD (Praxeon’s website for evidence based clinical search for physician users).
MyDailyApple is a Google Health integrated service, which means Google Health users can share their information between the two services.