Within3 December 28, 2008
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Another social networking take on healthcare- this one has a platform approach for multiple communities exclusively for providers and professionals in the life sciences and healthcare industry. Within3 aims to facilitate ‘trusted relationships’ amongst its members.
What sets it apart from the usual networking websites is their business model (plus the fact that its aptly explained on a dedicated page) . Within3 is free to individual professionals, and earns revenue by selling software licenses to health and life science organizations who wish to establish online communities inside the platform. There are some nice examples of communities built on their platform- like med school alumni website, medical associations, etc.
SimulConsult August 16, 2008
Posted by admin in : Decision Support , add a comment
SimulConsult is a diagnostic decision support system started by Dr.Michael Segal. It covers 1,800 diseases that have at least one neurological finding in them.
SimulConsult has an interesting logic behind it. Roughly speaking, its knowledge is derived from a ‘computational wiki’ that is restricted to physician users only. So its database is not only open for viewing, but users can submit modifications to the database. The system performs bayesian pattern matching and also considers temporal information like the age of onset and disappearance of each finding for each disease under consideration.
According to Dr.Segal, there are about 33,000 data points (disease findings) in the system and the future expansion plans are to include more of metabolism and genetic diseases. Interestingly, the wiki approach for knowledge gathering in healthcare is becoming more common (AskDrWiki, WikiDoc, wikiMD to note a few- more on them later).
SpineConnect June 24, 2008
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SpineConnect is a knowledge networking site for spine surgeons to collaborate and support each other on difficult cases. It is the first offering from Syndicom, an online services company focused on communication and collaboration platform for the orthopedic industry.
Since its launch in early 2006, SpineConnect has gathered 1174 members from 38 countries with a knowledge base of over 900 cases and 4200 reviews (June 2008 data). I’m not sure about their business model, but it has to do with facilitating partnerships to bring innovative spine surgery ideas to market.
My personal belief is that general social networking websites loose their value with scale- there needs to be a common passion among members for the community to thrive. SpineConnect is a good example of a narrow focus community discussing treatment, challenges, outcomes, research and new technologies for a very specific field. All the more better for targeted advertisements :-). The future of networking is niche… at least in healthcare.
Medscape Physician Connect June 24, 2008
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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 enough for them to call themselves “…the largest online community of physicians and healthcare professionals today”. Why bother with modesty or proof.
The business idea is to mine the community generated data and monetize it by letting sponsors directly participate and gain real-time insights into physician attitudes and perceptions. They provide online CME (free), journal articles and news/meetings/conference coverage. The standard WebMD fare of Medscape Drug Reference, expert columns and interviews are included too.
Curbside.MD June 16, 2008
Posted by admin in : Search Engines , add a comment
Curbside.MD is a search engine for finding evidence based clinical information. The idea is to type in the search need as a natural language question that a clinician would normally ask his/her colleague, and get relevant answers from the literature (articles, images, guidelines, etc.)
I took it for a test drive with a moderately complex question (’what is the indication for platelet transfusion in an 80 year old female with dengue fever?’) and got relevant results in terms of review articles and clinical trial outcomes. Pretty cool.
The logic behind Curbside.MD is semantic indexing using a controlled medical terminology (they call it “semantic fingerprinting“) with a bit natural language processing. They provide a bunch of tools (search box, news, spellchecker etc.) for partners and a browser search toolbar for users. The technology is also available as an API service from an alternate website called Fingerprint.MD.
Praxeon is the company that started Curbside.MD and MyDailyApple in 2006. Both websites are currently free for users, but the company admits to a future ad-based business model.
Sermo June 3, 2008
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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 $26.7 in 2007).
So what is special about Sermo? For one, it has been forming all the right partnerships. Take its alliance with the country’s largest physician organization (AMA), collaboration with pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and the agreement with main regulatory authority FDA. Second, it’s been successful in getting traction from a very fickle and tech-resistant group of prefessionals- physicians. Their compete.com report is pretty impressive:
The site claims 65,000 users and generates revenue by charging outsiders for access to the community. The data generated by physician interactions around medical events, treatments, observations, opinions provide valuable insights to commercial organizations. The ‘information arbitrage’ model, as Sermo calls it, is shown below:
Sermo is not alone in trying to aggregate and monetize the lucrative US physician community. Docsboard, SocialMD, DoctorNetworking are others in the game. There is competition in adjacent spaces too: NurseGroups, NurseLinkup are focusing on the registered nursing professionals, StudentDoctor.net focuses on medical students. Even finer niches like women in medicine are online (MomMD).