It’s a brilliant niche. MotherKnows will interact with the healthcare system (your physician, hospital, insurer, etc.) on your behalf to procure a copy of the medical record, store it, analyze it and make the information available to you on-demand. Anyone who has tried getting their child’s immunization record will agree that the conventional interaction is a sub-optimal customer service experience at best. So having someone else do it for you is worth paying for.

Once collected, the information is available in a PHR manner – view meds, problems, allergies, immunizations, growth charts in one place; create emergency cards; get reminders; mobile access, etc. But the key to MotherKnows’ viability, in my view, is being the authorized agent for painful extraction of medical records. As long as the pricing is right (which, at $19-$98/year, is in the right range) it will gain traction.

It’s a prudent strategy to market it initially to parents as a way to keep the records straight for their precious progeny. But I don’t see why it can’t be extended to adult healthcare consumers themselves. I’d like to be able to get my medical data all in one place, hopefully showing me trends found in my quasi-annual physical exams and labs. Today in the patient population, the motivated few try to save copies of records; and the enlightened few go one step further and manually key the data into an online PHR like Healthvault. In either case manual labor and discipline is required. Perhaps having a real-world service (of paper record collection) is what really can make a difference to PHR uptake by consumers. Hopefully, MotherKnows will reach beyond just child medical records in future.

The overall idea of patients paying an agency to wrest to their medical records from providers point to the underlying systemic inefficiencies. Theoretically, there are solutions on the horizon. An enterprise EHR used by care providers could pass the relevant info into a PHR accessible by patients. And if they change providers, a community-wide Health Information Exchange (HIE) could still enable patients to be the custodian of thier own information in another system. But we are not there yet.

The unmet need for electronic systems (like PHRs) to interface with the physical world (i.e. bricks and mortar organizations and paper processes) is very real. Till every end-point in healthcare delivery is digitized and interoperability is no longer a pipe dream, we’ll need services that handle real-world complexities. Take companies like eHGT who are already in this ‘record retrieval services‘ niche. By actually having real account managers who can get imaging records from facilities, they elevate the value proposition of an “Image Exchange” to new level. The phenomenon exists outside of healthcare too. The now defunct Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness (RAOGK) site was a volunteer effort to bridge the gap between virtual demand and physical supply of genealogy records.

Turns out that Lifescan apparently did nothing with that concept. Anita Mathew (who gave the demo on Lifescan’s behalf in 2009) decided to take it forward on her own and founded Glooko. The company currently sells MeterSync, a cable that connects your iPhone to five popular glucometers in the market. Users can download the ‘LogBook’ app from iTunes store to document, analyze and share their data.

I’m not an investor (yet), but if I was, I’d put my money in Glooko. This is exactly what the future should start to look like for conventional consumer health devices. Instead of being isolated products that store a limit amount of quarantined information, they need to provide a service that enables longitudinal disease management. For a patient with long-standing diabetes, he/she needs to know how much insulin to inject for covering the meal they are about to have, not what their blood glucose number is. It reminds me of Theodore Levitt’s famous MBA quote “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.”

For Glooko, the long-term sustainability is directly proportional to how useful and sticky it’s users find the logbook iPhone app. The hardware (Metersync) may be critical at first, but end user experience and market differentiation will come from the software. There is competition, of course. Agamatrix  has been in the market with it’s iPhone compatible glucometer, and last year they announced partnership with Sanofi-Aventis that gives them the much-needed commercialization ability. Instead of augmenting diagnosis, another company Cellnovo takes a similar approach with therapeutic insulin pumps. Perhaps we’ll see a synchronized gluocometer-insulin pump offering or an intelligent, symbiotic ecosystem for diabetes devices in future.

I’ve talked about the ‘last-mile’ of remote patient monitoring in the past. Conventional medical devices produce digital manifestations of physiological parameters, but the information collected hardly goes beyond the device itself.  We need consumer-oriented medical devices to become monitoring services that automate/transform the last mile for consumers. The future is arriving piecemeal, and sadly enough, it’s not being delivered by the incumbent behemoths of the medical device industry. Withings BP Monitor (which I can personally validate since I use it) enhances the value proposition of a regular BP Monitor for hypertensives. Zeo does the same for people with sleep disorders. Granted these offerings are perfect yet, but all vectors are aligned in the right direction. As for Glooko, look out J&J.

While reviewing Zeo and aXbo last year, I found myself wondering what was the need for having a bedside clock hardware, since most of that computing could be done in a smartphone. Seems like the crop of solutions  that followed (e.g. WakeMate, Lark, Zeo Mobile) thought of the same. EASYWAKEme follows the pattern: wearable sensor (on wrist) that monitors movement as a proxy for sleep phase, provides intelligent wake-up alarm and longitudinal insight into your sleeping habits. Their ‘how it works‘ page explains it well.

Quick market analysis shows that price is going to be a very important factor since there is a wide range right now and consumers will tend to favor the cheapest. EASYWAKEme (£118), aXbo (starts at €179), SleepTracker ($149) are at the more expensive end compared to competitors like Lark (starts at $99), Zeo (mobile is $99), FitBit ($99), Jawbone Up ($99). WakeMate has already started the downward spiral at $59.

Activity sensors like FitBit, and more recently Jawbone Up are also chomping at the bit to include sleep monitoring as their value proposition. Cheaper solutions that are just smartphone apps are competition too. I actually bought the $0.99 SleepCycle iphone app out of curiosity (it had >20,000 reviews, most were positive) and ended up forgetting about it after a week. I now put it in the same category as placebo: it’ll work only if you already believe it does.

So the real question is whether body movement tracking and analysis is really a dependable way for extrapolating sleep phases. I still believe (based on scientific persuasion like this, and this) that it is. The ultimate hope is that these low-cost innovations can make their way back to help with serious issues like sleep disorders and psychiatric disorders. Current solutions like polysomnography are too cumbersome to be done outside of a clinical setting.

Disclosure: the generous folks at EASYWAKEme offered to send me a review unit, so I’ll be testing that hypothesis over the next few weeks. Look out for an update to this review in near future.

Today, clinical professionals have tools (like Ovid, ScienceDirect, UpToDate, Trip) that help answer complex questions and are connected to validated knowledge bases derived off of sources like PubMed. But how does a patient, with no access or expertise in the domain find and leverage this information? Medify tries to solve that.

The value proposition of Medify is not easy to describe. In fact, the ‘What is Medify‘ description on the site was banal enough to be dismissed, just like most other online social health startup marketing. They do a better (albeit prolix) job on the ‘How it works‘ page. Medify will appeal to the well-informed patients who are not afraid to sift through piles of academic articles burdened with medical jargon to understand and manage their own disease. Medify gives them a dashboard of existing literature – with it they can monitor things like which treatments are gaining traction in the provider community, which institutions are on the forefront of relevant research, etc. Affiliated web 2.0 functionality like faceted search, social sharing, tracking, annotating are bundled in to make it more personal.

Under the hood, it is smartly leveraging what public knowledge bases are already out there. The citation and abstract are free from PubMed. Interstitial phrases and terms in the content are further linked to sources like Wikipedia and MeSH. Brief outcomes or summaries are synthetically constructed from the article text.

Medify is not alone. There are other sites that try to help patients navigate the vast sea of research literature. PubMed’s parent NLM runs MedLinePlus,  UpToDate has a patient-oriented version, and niche startups like MyDailyApple, PatientsLikeMe are also tackling this to some extent.

In 2001 Brian Haynes, MD, PhD wrote an article describing the landscape of such ‘pre-appraised’ resources through a hierarchical structure that had four layers (called “4S” Model):

• Original ‘Studies’ (what PubMed provides) at the base
• ‘Syntheses’ (systematic reviews sources like The Chochrane Library) of evidence just above that
• ‘Synopses’ (like EBM, EBN Online) of studies and syntheses next up, and
• the most evolved evidence-based information ‘Decision Support Systems’ at the top.

He later expanded the model to 2 more layers (read about the “6S” paper here), but the basic argument remained same – Information seekers should begin looking at the highest level resource available for the problem that prompted their search. That is a good framework to understand why services like Medify are needed.

The skeptics would argue that offerings like Medify will do little more than empower hypochondriacs. But I believe that well-served health information only makes outcomes better. The lag time between published research being implemented in real-world medical practice can be in the order of decades. As consumers, we are entrusted to make choices about other important topics like money, and the market provides personal finance tools/services to help. Same can apply to healthcare, without diminishing the role of experts.

Alliance Health offers services to create health-related social networks. So it’s like Ning (Marc Andreessen‘s online platform for custom social networks) for healthcare, except that users can’t self-service and start a health-related network on Alliance Health.

They currently operate separate networks on over 40 physical and mental health issues (see screenshot below). Each community offers the standard fare expected in a online social networking site- discussion forums, videos, posts, reviews, etc. The star performer in their portfolio is DiabeticConnect, which is reportedly the largest diabetic community online with around a million unique visitors monthly.

If you look at the top most active social networking websites today, there are hardly any entries related to health (DXY.cn, DailyStrength, CaringBridge are the only ones). Yet health information is one of the most commonly sought-after content online. So there is definitely scope and need for leveraging social features of internet for health. Doing so on a combined platform increases viability, since the mainstay of revenue for social networking is still advertising. Cumulative audience across all networks is a better sell to potential advertisers.

I have high hopes for Alliance Health. Once the user base is there (like in DiabeticConnect), there are significant revenue opportunities in data analytics and mining. Beyond niche topic-based networks, I think they can extend services to private organizations like large care delivery organizations, insurers to create white-label social networks.

Docmein is an online appointment scheduling service focused on private practices. The value proposition is that providers and patients can both use this online service to request and confirm appointments without any software to install. Side benefits are timely email reminders and custom pages for patients and practices.

It’s a bit surprising that healthcare continues to get the onslaught of simple web ideas repackaged from elsewhere. Perhaps its due to the relative ease of executing on internet-based ideas today. More importantly, it underscores how poor is the public perception of healthcare IT. Those who have observed the disruptive force of information technology elsewhere wonder why it hasn’t penetrated healthcare effectively. Hence the constant idea and technology arbitrage.

Most internet users are probably aware that online group scheduling services are free. Choices are plenty (Google Calendar, Tungle, TimeBridge, Jiffle, Doodle to name a few) and they are all very good. So what does healthcare need that can’t be fulfilled by these companies? Consider it from two perspectives: inpatient and outpatient.

Outpatient scheduling is more aligned with the services described above. The need is for patients and providers to coordinate a mutually convenient appointment time. But usually patients already know their provider by the time they are trying to find an appointment (e.g. they’ve called the insurance company or the doctor’s office). So finding an appointment time is just a short conversation away. The real value proposition is when patients are still open to picking a provider. That’s when such consumer-oriented outpatient scheduling services are really worth using. ZocDoc does this.

On the inpatient side the need is for a enterprise-grade, rules-based scalable system that integrates with various existing healthcare information systems. To figure out what is the most suitable appointment time for a patient coming in for knee replacement, the scheduling department needs to know the status of radiology/lab reports, clinical resource availability, OR schedule etc. Even just scheduling in-house clinical staff is often an insurmountable and complicated task. For example, YourNurseIsOn is s start-up specifically focused on the nurse scheduling and communication.

Docmein may not be there yet, but scheduling in healthcare delivery systems is definitely a problem waiting to be solved.

There are exceptions though, perhaps due to changes like Orphan Drug Act of 1983. Take Genzyme‘s wonder drug cerezyme for example. It’s target population (worldwide) are the roughly 10,000 patients affected with Gaucher’s Disease. For each patient, the drug treatment costs $200,000 annually and is needed for life. No wonder that even with that small target market, cerezyme accounts for about 30% of Genzyme’s revenues, netting close to a billion dollars every year ($1.24B in 2008, for example).

Such exceptional, near-magical stories are not limited to pharma wonderland. Patients with some rare conditions have found exceptional support through dedicated online communities started by inspired individuals who are often patients themselves. PatiensLikeMe was started for ALS, for example. Ben’s Friends was started by Ben Munoz in 2006 for AVM. There are many more niche online destinations for rare conditions, and that fact is hardly surprising.

The really interesting trend, though, is the emergence of companies/organizations that offer something at a higher level; beyond just a focused online destination for an uncommon disease. CureTogether is a good example. By aggregating self-reported data from patients, it aims to create an open-source research database for uncommon conditions. Similarly, Bens’s Friends acts as an incubator and clearinghouse of online communities focused on the long tail of rare medical conditions. They claim to have around 25 networks and over 7,000 patients in their family of ad-supported communities. The sites don’t have huge number of visitors, but that is perhaps due to the implicit rarity of target audience. See the quantcast chart below, for example, where I compare couple of their communities that are supposedly the most popular.

Regardless of visitor numbers, Ben’s Friends points to an interesting evolution phenomenon for healthcare information online. Building communities is now old-school. The new set of ideas are at a higher level of abstraction.

The free app is currently only available for iPhone platform. It offers a staple of standard social networking functionality- creating profile pages, looking up colleagues based on certain criteria, finding med-school classmates, sharing private contact info, sending messages etc. Being mobile-focused gives it some amount of differentiation from other online physician networking sites, I guess. Users can also look up phone numbers and location maps of healthcare facilities like pharmacies but I dont quite see what is the unique selling point in that. Below is a short video demo of some of the functionality.

On to more important things.

Their about page hints at their possible revenue models – “We have a number of fee-based products in the works, including a service for hospitals and clinics to better manage their scheduling and on-call lists“. In an online interview with iMedicalApps, their CEO gave more details. First, they plan to sell a premium version (base version will always be free) to hospitals as a real-time ‘enhanced communication tool’ for physicians so they can get quick consults, updates etc. from each other. That may work, but only if the hospitals or physician groups foot the complete bill for such an ‘enhancement’ tool. I doubt individuals would pay anything for it- enlightened physicians may already have effective substitutes through enterprise EMR messaging functionality or Linkedin/Twitter.

Second one was honorariums given for occasional survey participation. Hmm…don’t think practicing physicians would find that lucrative enough to join, since the time spent on doing such things is almost never worth the money that can be offered in return.

Third one was mediation fee for physician recruiting. Now that may work, but it depends on how they structure the job-exchange functionality. Because there is a real risk of physician recruiters short-circuiting Doximity and approach the candidate physicians directly if they can identify them for free on the network.

Irrespective of the vague details on the revenue model, I’m a supporter of niche social networks. I think the Facebooks and Linkedins of the world are eventually going to be victims of their own success. Beyond a certain size, generic networks risk imploding under their own weight. Just like MySpace did. Professional networks (especially for highly paid professions like doctors, lawyers) need to serve very specific purpose and be fine-tuned to that. One specific aspect that may be served well by a real-time physician social network is scheduling. Enterprise-wide, rules-based smart scheduling that enables physicians to manage their availability in a group setting is a tough problem to solve. There is some analogy to be found in the nurse scheduling space- a startup called YourNurseIsOn. This page explains what they do. That kind of service, I think, is something that large healthcare establishments can find convincing enough to pay for.

By the way, those who know Joomla (the popular open-source content management system) would notice the uncanny resemblance of Doximity logo to Joomla’s logo. Hopefully they will realize it at some point and get a new logo made.

Dec 2011 Update: Doximity changed their logo..

My interest piqued after I heard David L. Inns (Jitterbug CEO) speak at the Mobile Health 2010 event held in May 2010 at Stanford University. He described a sizable list of Health-related services available to Jitterbug customers. Here is the current list, and pertinent facts (from May 2010 time frame) from the presentation he gave at the event:

• Check-in Calls: Automated calls to check-in on the user or a loved one. $5/month.
• Medication Reminders: Automated calls at the right time to remind taking medication. Neat functionality includes a prescription refill reminders (with option to be connected to the pharmacy), personal dashboard that tracks medication adherence, and the ability to share it with others. In partnership with Meridian Health. $10/month.
• LiveNurse: Unlimited 24-access to a registered nurse for health advice and information. Free on rate plan $29 and up, $4 month otherwise. 12,000 reported users in 6 months post-release and about 4000 calls handled per month. One-fifth of the callers end up seeking medical attention within 24 hours.
• Daily Health Tips: Daily guidance and tips on living a heart-healthy lifestyle. Free. In partnership with the American Heart Association’s Go Red For Women Movement. Reported 4,000 users.
• Wellness Calls: 5-minute per week motivational calls with tips and techniques related to topics like sleeplessness, stress, loneliness etc. Attracted 1,000 users in one month. Free with plans above $29. Content by Brian Alman who runs TruSage.
• 5 Star Emergency Response: Personal emergency response service. Based on the offering by startup MobiWatch that they acquired late 2009. Supposed to be launching around Fall 2010.
• D-Coach: A little-known, yet-to-be-launched diabetes management service in partnership with WellDoc. Incidentally, WellDoc’s Diabetes service recently got FDA clearance in August 2010.

None of these service concepts are unique per se, each has been attempted by other wireless (and non-wireless) companies. But two things make them highly viable within Jitterbug. First is their niche target market. It’s no secret that majority of healthcare costs are due to individuals age 65 and up. And that is Jitterbug’s target user too. A personal mobile device may provide the elusive ‘last-mile‘ access to such individuals. Second is the personalized, high-touch nature of Jitterbug’s service. Jitterbug users are already used to connecting with a human operator with one button-click and use them for pretty much everything – find a contact, dial the number, get weather info, etc.. Adding health-related services to that framework makes undeniable sense.

It’s not hard to imagine other services waiting to materialize- outpatient appointment scheduling and reminders, preventive services (flu shots, etc.) assistance, personal health record information access, to name a few. I bet we’ll see more wireless network operators move into the healthcare services vertical. For now, advantage Jitterbug.

I heard Sunil Kripalani (PictureRx founder) speak at a Kaiser Permanente Garfield Center event earlier this month. Some of the data he presented was quite eye-opening. More than a third of Americans have basic or below basic health literacy levels (see National Assessment of Adult Literacy 2006 here) and some of the written drug information formats today haven’t been revised in decades (like rx bottle lables, package inserts, etc.).

PictureRx offers a visual aggregation of all medication relevant information for the patient. What does the pill look like, when to take it, how to take it, why should you take it… are all laid out in a simple format.

Verbal instructions at doctors office are often forgotten. And labels on pill bottles dispensed at retail pharmacies tend to be confusing, especially for the population demographic that takes the majority of prescribed medications- seniors. Patients who clearly understand when, how or why they take a medication are less likely to have events like missing a dose, wrong dose or running out.

Medication management is one of the spaces where an incremental improvement of  single-digit percent can mean huge improvement in outcomes and cost savings for the healthcare system overall. Simplified instructions, with clear emphasis on the important aspects of medication regimen can be a much more fundamental change agent than sophisticated reminders.

MedWatcher is a mobile application trying to streamline this process, and increase public (patient) participation in pharmacovigilence. FYI- it’s not out yet (some sources projected Aug 2010 release, but I couldn’t find it in iTunes), so all that is known is intended functionality.

The application will serve two major purposes. First, users can receive drug-related alerts through it, based on FDA MedWatch and less-formal sources (news, media etc.). FDA MedWatch may be a treasure-trove of information, but it’s not easy to use. You can subscribe to an RSS feed, get email or text messages about all drug-related warnings. With tens of thousands of drugs on the market, that is like drinking from a fire hose.

If you are a patient worried about your cholesterol-lowering Zocor or a cardiologist who wants to stay informed about statins in general, there needs to be a way to subscribe to only what you care about. I’m hoping that MedWatcher leverages a comprehensive drug-database like FDB, Medi-Span, Red Book etc. to lets users do exactly that.

The second major functionality is for users (both patients and provider) to submit side-effects through a lean process. They mention that serious side-effects will ‘automatically’ be submitted to FDA (rest probably become discussion topics on MedWatcher itself). The current FDA MedWatch online reporting process is cumbersome and a bit disconnected (who remembers to submit voluntary information after they have seen/experienced a side-effect?).  Having a user-friendly mobile application form would solve some of that.

I think the direct patient engagement is very promising in this niche space. The concept may run the risk of becoming yelp for drugs, but even yelp reviews hold useful information once you figure out how to get rid of the noise. By opening direct communication channel with patients, it has the potential to provide the same disintermediation that TrialX provides for clinical trials.

Seems like there are three components of the overall offering:

1. A hardware device called “Spiroscout” – a small add-on that mounts the inhaler canister. Every time it is pushed, the location and time-stamp data is recorded.
2. Mobile app – a ‘diary’ to keep track of symptoms, triggers, medications, etc. Can also be used to view map of data received from Spiroscout, and to get sms reminders for taking medication.
3. Online website – a ‘dashboard’ of sorts. Can help summarize submitted data to figure out disease patterns and trends.

The hardware device is not out yet (website says it’ll be out this summer), and the mobile app is currently in private beta. So there is not much of real world testing that has happened. But I’m still positive about Asthmapolis, for a number of reasons.

First, it’s the right kind of ‘focused’ monitoring solution that can potentially be transformative for managing a specific disease (kinda like Regina Herzlinger‘s argument about ‘Focused Factories‘ as one of the ways to salvage the entire healthcare system). It’s better than trying to find a solution that can monitor multiple conditions (example 1, example 2). I think the mobile diary and online dashboard would be key engagement tools in this regard. The more focused and customizable, the better.

Second, it helps in medication adherence which is a big issue irrespective of the medical condition. I think that knowing whether you took your medications and getting reminders if you didn’t,  is more powerful than knowing when/where you took it. The mobile app reminders would be a great resource there (automated calls to landlines may be good too…for seniors).

Third, it helps understand the individual triggers and community impact of asthma. For successful asthma management, a patient should know his/her triggers and avoid getting exposed to them. That is not an easy task for a number of reasons. My initial reaction was that GPS may be a bit of an overkill. But with rapidly decreasing cost of location-aware technology, why not? Much better than using it to check-in to nearby McDonalds.

At the core is a symptom-checker that lets users do a high-level categorization of what could be wrong with them, and how serious/not can it be. That functionality is nothing special, since there are multiple services that do that both online and mobile. Also included is a nationwide directory of care facilities (including urgent care, retail clinics, pharmacies and physician offices) and nurse advice phonelines (sorted by insurance provider). Your smartphone knows where you are, so the neat service is to be able to find directions to the nearest facility with few clicks. It may not sound like much; but when you are away from home, it’s pretty useful to be able to quickly figure out the nearest urgent care or retail clinic. iTriage is also trying to take this service to another level with the addition of ‘ER wait times‘ functionality in select cities. That way a user can further filter out the facilities based on wait times. Even if this is not really present/reliable in your area today, I think it’s a brilliant extension of a service like iTriage. Because its not a question of if this will be useful, but when. Once there is a critical mass of hospitals in an area submitting their ER-time feed to iTriage, the rest will find it hard not to do the same. There is a need for public to have a near real-time pulse on ER utilization, and services like iTriage provide a good platform for it.

The other interesting aspect is their partner service integration. Healthgrades provides the physician/hospital quality reports within iTriage, although users need to pay to get info beyond minimal basic report. Teladoc provides the 24×7 physician advise service (its phone consultations are for under 40$ mostly). They also partner with a claims adjudication organization (name?) that helps consumers negotiate thier medical bills. One can argue that a lot of the above functionality can be accomplished with a mobile browser or search app. But the value-add of a dedicated app is to provide fast, context-relevant info and be a steady companion as the user traverses the acute healthcare system.

I heard Paul Hudson, MD (co-founder) speak at the Mobile Health 2010 conference last month. He used an intriguing term to describe their technology: “symptom-to-provider technology”. Guess that is one way to think about a IT service that holds your hand from beginning to end of an acute care episode. He placed iTriage in the “multi-billion $ self-referral market”, and gave couple of interesting factoids about it’s current utilization:

• Around 89% iTraige members are commercially insured
• It’s use has gone beyond Emergency care in some cases- people have used the Healthgrades info to switch providers

Both of those underscore the fact that consumers need a trusted guide in handling how they interact with the acute care system. ERs, Urgent Care centers are the way most people experience care delivery most of the time, and having insurance doesn’t really help in making a good choice. With mobile phones getting smarter, the ‘self-referral’ market is ripe for innovative services.

GlowCaps fits the standard pill container, and uses short-range wireless communication to talk to a gateway hub at home that is connect to the internet. There is also a reminder light (looks like a night light) that plugs into any standard power outlet. If the bottle isn’t opened at the appointed time, the cap and night light start blinking to remind the owner to take the medication. If after an hour, the pill is still not taken, GlowCap starts start playing jingles as well. After yet another hour, it’ll send a message to Vitality’s system which can then place an automated phone call or send a text message with a reminder. Brilliant.

Beyond having a ‘smart lid’ for bottles, Vitality has integrated functionality that keeps caregivers in loop. There are social support features (shareable weekly email reports), refill facilitation (refill reminder calls) and physician interaction tools (printed monthly reports to you/doctor). So it hits all the major interaction points for a patient’s medication regimen. Last month AT&T put out a press release about GlowCaps running on its wireless network. So the Vitality gateway now has mobile phone technology, and I assume that precludes the need for an ethernet connection.

Every clinician knows that medication adherence is a huge problem ($100B figure has been thrown around as the cost of poor adherence in US). More than a consumer product, this is a fantastic service that can change medication packaging in general. And looking at the Managed Care (enhance the personal/medical record), Research (change patient behavior) and Pharma (reduce brand-switching) focused pages of their website, I think Vitality knows that. It’s definitely the next stage in evolution of the standard pill dispensers (like ePill, Philips).

Their CEO David Rose has an interesting background in creating internet-connected everyday devices at his last company, Ambient Devices. Somewhere in a press release I read his quote about “…providing minute-by-minute adherence data to motivate healthy behavior.” If you take the word ‘adherence’ out, that may be a basis for a lot of future medical solutions and an adage for next-generation of medical device companies.

Feb 2011 Update: GlowCaps was acquired by the billionaire surgeon Patrick Soon-Shiong. He is the director of UCLA’s Wireless Health Institute.

In an effort to understand what is unique about Zumi Life, I stumbled upon this interview with its CEO. Crunchbase tells me that they started with $700k seed funding in 2007 and got a Series A infusion of $1M in April 2008. With that context, several questions come to mind. Zume Life needs manual input for all the data it needs from the user- and that assumes the user to be reliable enough to put it in. If Zuri had a sensor to automatically capture the critical vitals (like Zeo, Bodymedia, DirectLife, FitBit, LifeShirt and scores of other devices), that would make it infinitely more useful. But I understand that there is no automatic sensor for your mood or for what you just ate, so somethings need to be captured manually. Which is why there are services like RememberItNow, Reqall, Zealog, Polka etc. Still, why not get the medication list for Zuri from PHR platforms like Google Heath? If we assume that the chronically ill and overworked individual remembers to input their care regimen in one place, why wouldn’t they use a simple paper sticky note or a smartphone reminder app? Even a simple Google Calendar or 30Boxes event can be configured to deliver reminder emails that show up as audible, sms alerts on your phone. So is there really a need for a dedicated hardware device in a world that is slowly converging mobile computing platforms? Zuri reminds me of the device that is made to do twitter only.

The price tag was also a bit of surprise. Although there is no official mention of pricing on the Zume Life website, I found a PCmag article from Sept’09 that quotes $35/month or $300/year for the service, and $4.99 for the iPhone app. That sounds way too much money for a basic alerting and journal-keeping service that is 100% manual entry based.

Of course, it’s easy to criticize others idea. I don’t have the complete facts on the service, its utilization and its founder’s vision. The overall trend of using patient-oriented hardware devices integrated with web and mobile dashboard/analytics to manage chronic conditions is for real. I just think sensors are a key aspect of such devices and that pricing can be Achilles heel for adoption.

Early 2010 Update: ZumeLife has closed operations and is no longer in business.

FreeMD is the free online version of the same underlying triage application. It  uses video to conduct the interview, ask questions and then generates a custom web page that contains care instructions and suggested next steps. I tested it with a few hypothetical cases (from benign nose bleed to serious UTI) and it seemed to do fine for basic diagnosis. With vague complaints like diffuse abdominal pain and vomiting, it stayed roughly in the right categories at a high-level (appendicitis, pancreatitis, kidney stones, gallbladder disease, intestinal obstruction).

Is the underlying logic based on hierarchical structured programming or a more sophisticated expert system with forward and backward chaining algorithms? I don’t know. My interest in FreeMD spiked when I saw the 100K+ unique visitors/month statistic. They are consistently generating a lot of traffic, so there’s got to be fairly comprehensive content and at least some utility in the service. My personal impression is that as a patient-oriented triage tool, it does well. Of course, provider-oriented decision support is tougher and I don’t expect it to hold up like Mcyin or DXplain.

I’m also intrigued why DSHI systems chose to make their application available for free, when the revenue model seems to be based on licensing/co-branding with partners. I was half-expecting to see a feedback loop on FreeMD (like “Was this the right diagnosis? Let us know”) since one of the major reasons for open-sourcing anything is to leverage wisdom of crowds. But there isn’t anything like that, so maybe its all about gaining awareness and marketing the application.

Feb’10 Update: Connected with Dr. Steven Schueler after writing this post. He correctly identified that FreeMD is a triage system, so its a bit unfair to compare it with diagnostic decision support systems like Mycin/DXplain.

Dec’10 Update: FreeMD has a new look now. The user interface is much better and the interaction is much more easy (handy pain scale, descriptive pictures for example). Some interesting new functionality has been added too:

• Triage results now provide more information: FAQ, video explanations, and images
• Best options for care included in results, like ER, Urgent Care. Especially interesting are newer venues like eVisit and Retail Clinics. Hovering over each option gives some useful information like average charge expected at that venue. Very cool.
• The final ‘Triage Report’ can be printed or copied to clipboard.

These are all steps in the right direction. A more integrated future (like export capability to Google Health Record, or ER wait times from iTriage, or provider rankings from Vitals) would definitely establish FreeMD as a viable online triage destination.

So consider it as the social network that started before the age of social networking. It now offers blogs, forums, reviews, news, feeds, tweets and other community features to people interested in mental health. Seems like they are making a decent revenue with it too.

Always good to see focused, pragmatic and simple solutions being successful. Proves the point that social networking has more potential when done in a niche way.

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 don’t think of it as novel, 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.

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.

April 12, 2010 update: Got a demo of new functionality from CEO Pam Swingly. Besides medication reminders online and on mobile platform, they now also offer a personal health record and the ability to create care communities.

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.