There’s lots of activity in Health 2.0. So I thought I’d showcase a couple of new sites today…
1. A company that I’ve been closely involved with and (FD!) am
an adviser to, Enhanced Medical Decisions, has now officially launched
the beta of DoubleCheckMD.
You can go to the site, put in your symptoms and the drugs that you’re
on and effectively (without knowing it) in seconds search the entire
literature on which symptoms might be caused by the drugs you’re on,
what possible interactions there might be, what your next steps should
be, and what else you should be aware of. I know I’m biased but I think
that this is one of the most innovative technologies developed so far
in Health 2.0.
2. CEO Chiara Bell has been working hard to develop Enurgi, which allows people to locate, hire, manage and pay nursing staff for families that need support for elderly relatives at home. A nice integration of directory, social networking and functionality. And of course nurses and other caregiver professionals can use this site to look for business.
3. Health World Web launched
this year with a healthcare provider directory that allows members to
search for providers and add their own reviews and rankings to that
knowledge base. In September, HWW relaunched its patient community with
social network functionality. Dan Kogan the CEO says to think of this
site as a cross between Facebook and Citysearch.com that’s devoted to
health and healthcare. Like the former site you can create your own
communities, like the latter you can search for the Healthcare
providers in your area or country-wide as well as research their
education and experience and share that information with others. Stay
tuned for other HWW innovative functionalities based on social network
and decision making platform. To learn more about Health World Web go
to here.
All of these are very, very early stage companies. And all of them have really interesting promise. Feel free to go take a look. And of course give the companies feedback as to what you thing about their tools.
Categories: Uncategorized
Thanks for your comment, Bev. As Matthew indicated, the DoubleCheckMD product is being tested at multiple levels by teams of physicians, pharmacists and other healthcare professionals. The product is still in the beta phase, and testing has not yet been fully completed.
About the case that you gave as an example – if someone taking tetracycline developes headaches but does not yet know that their symptom is due to “pseudotumor cerebri”, DoubleCheckMD makes the connection for them. It informs them that the drug is a common cause of headaches, and also lets them know that headaches due to pseudotumor cerebri have been reported. (In other words, the system helps with the diagnosis).
If, on the other hand, the diagnosis had been established and pseudotumor cerebri is entered into DoubleCheckMD as a potential adverse drug effect, the system informs the user that tetracycline has been reported to cause several cases.
We’d love to hear your feedback if you have a chance to test the system.
Thanks,
Marlene Beggelman MD
CEO Enhanced Medical Decisions (creator of DoubleCheckMD)
Another relatively new player – HealthSphere. Powerful search with unique categorized results and integrated social networking specific to health care.
WAY to GO Chiara!
Enurgi is fantastic
– christopher
Bev. At the moment for DoubleCheckMD you have to have both a symptom and a drug. Otherwise you’d get just a huge list of all the possible symptoms a drug or interaction between multiple drugs might cause–and there are lots. You can definitely enter rare symptoms and drugs and see if the system picks them up–that’s exactly what it’s designed to do. The CEO Marlene Beggelman is an MD and has worked with hundreds of specialists as she’s build Enhanced Medical Decisions. This particular product is using (I believe) the Multum database, which obviously has lots of MDs involved in its development (as it’s basically a compilation of clinical trial data). But over time the product will include more and more different data sources, and of course how they are integrated will depend in part on EMD’s use of its medical advisory board.
Matthew;
Since you’re an adviser to the first-mentioned company, I am curious as to how their drug side effect-detecting system was tested. Can the system be used backwards – e.g. enter common drug combinations and see what symptoms might ensue? Also, did someone enter some of the more rare symptoms (like headache caused by pseudotumor cerebri in teenagers on tetracycline-class drugs) and see if the system picked them up? This has promise but I wonder if various M.D. specialties were heavily involved in the testing part.
I like the Enurgi idea, as one who has an 86 yr old mother!