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.

A more loaded one-line description of Archimedes (taken from his original paper in 2002): “It’s an object-oriented, continuous-time, full simulation model for addressing a wide range of clinical, procedural, administrative, and financial decisions in health care at a high level of biological, clinical, and administrative detail.” Phew. I’ll confess that I don’t know what exactly is under the hood. But I know enough about the informatics field to believe that this approach is viable and very exciting.

This YouTube video explains how the model can be used to run virtual clinical trials. Kasier has already backed the findings of Archimedes to change their diabetes care delivery.  I think there are fantastic, unlimited opportunities for applying such a fundamental model to medicine- personalized health predictions, public health, health policy, cost-effectiveness and what not.  As a startup, they are doing fine. With an impressive list of partners/clients, and a $15.6M RJWF grant (2007), they have a good runway and momentum. They have all the right ingredients to be a change agent for next-generation Healthcare IT.

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.

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.