WebDiet January 4, 2009
Posted by admin in : Health Tools , add a comment
WebDiet is an online weight management tool that can help its users eat smarter and healthier. Its a service that proactively sends location-based, customized meal suggestions directly to mobile devices and helps keep track of what you eat.
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).
Familyhistory.hhs.gov December 5, 2008
Posted by admin in : Health Tools , add a comment
Dont think this one qualifies to be a 2.0 idea, but it got me thinking about one. On 25th November 2008, the US Surgeon General announced a major upgrade to their Family History Tool. It’s a part of the a national public health campaign, called the Surgeon General’s Family History Initiative, to encourage all American families to learn more about their family health history.
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 November 27, 2008
Posted by admin in : Health Tools , add a comment
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
Posted by admin in : Health Records , add a comment
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
Posted by admin in : Search Engines , add a comment
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
Posted by admin in : Insurance, Search Engines , add a comment
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.