In their own words ‘Psych Central is the Internet’s largest and oldest independent mental health social network’. From what I can find, it seems to be true. They have been online since 1995, and last year got close to half a million unique visitors.

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.

CareFlash has an interesting take on social networking for patients. It lets you create a private, secure website to inform and update your family/friends about your medical condition- an online ‘community’ of sorts. Good concept. Having an invite-only, private community helps everyone to stay current with latest developments about the health of someone they love, without everyone calling and visiting all the time. They have some neat features like a shared calendar, email alerts, forums etc.

The crown jewel offering is the educational content- they have 3D medical animations around a long list of conditions. These are meant to help patients and relatives better understand the medical condition. The content is developed by another company (Blausen Medical) and is high-quality, professional grade. I reviewed some of the videos and found them quite useful.

Its been around since 2007 and gets substantial visitors- around 2K+ per month. The site is completely free, and one of the press releases points to their business model “CareFlash is completely free to our users because select industries value having their advertisements tastefully and unobtrusively displayed in the circumstances on which each unique community is based.” Although I didn’t see any ads next to the videos I saw.

Nothing new here. Ozmosis is based on the now-old concept of physician networking website, with features like knowledge exchange, journal club, cases, alerts, news etc. Looking at dataopedia, they don’t have much traction either (roughly 1K visitors per month).

Although I’d always like to write about novel ideas, exceptions like these are purely from a record-keeping perspective. I’m trying to get a rough list of how many different takes of social networking for clinical professionals are currently floating around on the web.

Online communities are nothing new to healthcare. What seems to be the trend is increasing vertical focus. Oncocentric (also called MedTrust Online) was launched in January 2009 as an online community for oncologists. Their aim is to help find, manage and share information by connecting oncologists with each other. They have other features like twitter updates, ‘OncoAssist’ panel of experts, search engine, etc.

The site seemed to be more like an offshoot of a professional organization, and not a startup, so I delved further. Seems like MedTrust Online was formed to leverage genetic-based medical discoveries by a non-profit organization called TGen (Translational Genomics Research Institute). TGen and MedTrust signed licensing and service agreements to bring to market potential drug therapies based on genomics.

Not much else to note about the site since I dont have insider access. Their site tour talks about standard features like sharing cases, ask experts, general forums, news etc. It’d be interesting to find out how many of the 30,000 or so oncology professionals are currently members of the site.

Simply put, icyou is the Youtube of health-related videos. It launched around September 2007 by BenefitFocus, a Charleston (SC) based healthcare benefits software provider. The name icyou stands for ‘Intensive Content for Your Health’…a twist on the actual ICUs (Intensive Care Units).

Basic idea is for icyou to be the exchange hub for patients, providers and caregivers to share their stories and experiences with the world. Some social networking add-ons like profile page, blogs are included too. The company seems to be well-funded and seriously engaged, given their onsite studio and mainstream press coverage.

I’m not a big optimist when it comes to online video space, but icyou does point to an important trend: massive information sharing platforms like online videos are prone to be more successful (as businesses) when adapted to a niche.  Healthcare is a great example of such a niche. But I’m not convinced if anyone has mastered a straight forward revenue model. Icyou doesn’t mention how they intend to monetize their content either. They don’t have ads running, but even if they did, advertising can’t really pay the bills for such a bandwidth-heavy service.

Good ideas are always simple. I’m really optimistic about the emerging simple tools that let consumers manage, monitor or understand their health issues better. ZeaLOG is a simple tracker that lets you measure anything, and report off it. The service seems pretty new and driven by a team of one, so there are some rough edges here and there. Most of the ZeaLOGs started are around profound topics like ‘Number of Simpsons Episodes Watched’ or ‘TV Dinners Eaten’, but there are some borderline-serious ones too (exercise, diet related).

It’s not focused on healthcare issues, but I see potential for something like this in chronic conditions that affect an individual’s lifestyle. A good example is migraines. Those who have these terrible headaches would benefit from knowing exactly how many did they have this month vs. past 6 months and what were they doing when it started. So If one could log the onset/end of a migraine attack and the preceding activity conveniently, it’d be easy to spot a pattern (e.g. higher chance of migraine after cold shower).

Why not keep a simple diary bedside? or spreadsheet? Yeah, you can. But how many people do? And how many diaries can remind you to enter latest information in them and chart/graph your progress? It’d be a good idea to add some social networking features to ZeaLOG- finding comparative stats or just connecting with others in the same state as you are powerful motivators for using such tools (for example- Qwitter). ZeaLOG has twitter integration, but it’d be neat to have a mobile app too, especially one that syncs up intelligently with online data.

There is a paid service idea in this concept somewhere. I’m sure we’ll see one soon in healthcare.

Healthcare applications of Twitter keep surfacing everyday. Qwitter (not to be confused with another application by the same name that tracks people who stop following you on twitter) is a smoking-cessation tool built by the Florida Department of Health under a 2008 campaign called ‘Tobacco Free Florida’. It works like this- you tweet the number of cigarettes you smoked to @iquit <number> and Qwitter collects that into a progress ‘graph’. If your tweet is not a number, it adds it to your ‘journal’. So it becomes an ongoing dashboard of sort- with which you can monitor your progress and share it with others (that follow you) to get their supporting tweets back. People may scoff at this idea for being too niche or too small.. but I say “why not?”  Its putting social media to good use for smokers. Every little bit helps.

Not much can be said about the whole healthcare social networking phenomenon now. There are plenty of sites out there, enough to make me almost give up trying to review all of them. But pioneers like MedHelp are worthwhile to talk about.

MedHelp gives the (now) standard online community features to users looking for better information and support around thier medical problems. It was started around 1994 and now draws more than 2 million unique visitors a month.  Perhaps that is why they have long-standing partnerships with the top medical institutions like Cleveland Clinic and Partners Health. Not sure if advertising is the only source of revenue for them- plenty of companies willing to pay for access to this kind of rich data for patient insights.