The Health Wisdom Blog™ (by OrganizedWisdom)

Meet with the OrganizedWisdom Team at Health 2.0

We just finished meeting with David Kibbe and Indu Subaiya to review our forthcoming presentation we'll be giving at next week's Health 2.0 conference in San Diego.

We're thrilled to be demoing for the second time (I believe we are the only company attending to hold such an honor!) at this amazing event. We can't wait to show the group how we will be evolving our WisdomCards and even more importantly, we can't wait to introduce these new features to our users over the coming weeks. 

Next week, we'll post more about these features and how they will help our users so be sure to check back.   We'll also post several updates about the exciting new companies and people we meet at Health 2.0.

The past few months have been very exciting for OrganizedWisdom and we couldn't be happier with the progress we're making.  Because of an amazing team effort, we've managed to beat our own aggressive projections, and have already created WisdomCards to cover more than 8,000 of the most important health searches.  And, we're only just beginning.  Additionally, user feedback for our new WisdomCard design has been tremendous.  What do you think?

If you're planning on attending Health 2.0 we'd love to meet up with you and see how we may be able to work together.  And if you can't make it, then we look forward to getting your feedback about the new services we'll be launching on OrganizedWisdom Health and connecting with you online.

PRESS RELEASE: COMPANIES TO TACKLE NEW STANDARDS FOR HEALTHCARE PROVIDER INFORMATION SHARING

A consortium of nine US-based healthcare technology companies and healthcare providers has announced it will lead adoption of a new consistent file format standard for collecting, storing and exchanging of healthcare provider data.

To be called a dCard -- short for doctor card -- the new technology criterion is intended to establish basic data collection standards where they currently do not exist. Along with improved ease of collaboration, the partnership will help ensure consistency and accuracy among users of this information.

“In today’s healthcare marketplace, basic identifier information about a physician or hospital is scattered in different formats and in different places across the internet,” said Christopher Parks, co-founder/CEO of change:healthcare, one of the companies working on the standard. “And there’s no certainty of the information being timely, accurate or consistent. As more consumer healthcare information is pushed out to end-users, how can we expect people to make good healthcare decisions if the information they’re basing them on is inaccurate? The first step towards transparency in this industry is the very basic foundation of all parties agreeing on consistent labeling of information. The dCard standard will help all of us do that.”

Joining change:healthcare, a Nashville-based technology firm focused on bringing transparency throughout the healthcare industry, in developing the dCard, are:

• Within3 (Online professional network for health science professionals and organizations)(www.within3.com);
• OrganizedWisdom Health (First human-powered, physician-reviewed search service for health information, products and services on the web) (www.organizedwisdom.com);
• VerusMed (Providers of clinical briefs for 150,000+ physicians and healthcare professionals)(www.verusmed.com);
• Peerclip (Online tool that enables physicians to organize, share, discuss and discover relevant medical information)(www.peerclip.com);
• Ozmosis (Online platform that unites physicians and healthcare organizations in a collaborative environment to improve patient care) (www.ozmosis.com);
• Enurgi (Online healthcare services company that connects families and patients-in-need with 1 million+ local, clinical caregivers across the country) (www.enurgi.com);
• J. Parkinson, M.D. (Leading healthcare consumerism advocate and New York-based family practice physician)(www.jayparkinsonmd.com);
• ReliefInsite (Secure, online pain management services) (www.reliefinsite.com).

OrganizedWisdom Joins Movement to Set New Standards for Health Provider Information Sharing

We're proud to join 8 other founding health technology companies who are joining the movement to set new standards for health provider information sharing to create what is known as the dCard standard. Work on the dCard standard will culminate later in the spring with a summit where we will work together to finalize, approve and approve this new standard so we can launch the dCard around May 1, 2008.

The era of proprietary health information standards needs to come to an end so we can all work together to help ensure information accuracy, speed up innovation, and ultimately make sure people get access to better information that they can use to manage their health care.

We've personally seen how beneficial developing consistent standards can be for all in several other industries from previous businesses we've built.  In the early and mid 1990's there were no standards for online advertising.  We helped create a consortium to shape those standards that eventually helped the online advertising industry grow and flourish.  Now the IAB has clear and specific standards and everyone knows the guidelines.

It is surprising that the health care industry hasn't worked together before now to set these types of provider information standards, but as is often the case, there are a new group of entrepreneurs and innovators pounding at the gate to make change happen.   We're  proud to be one of these companies who do not accept the status quo.  We believe that it is simply too important to find ways to leverage technology, collaboration, and innovation to improve how the health care system operates.  Consumers are now demanding it, and Health 2.0 leaders are too...

Read the full press release here (PDF) and today's article about it in VentureBeat.

If you'd like to get involved in helping propel the dCard forward please post a comment below.

How to Recommend a Link on OrganizedWisdom

Did you know that you can recommend links on OrganizedWisdom?

One of the features we've always had on our WisdomCards is the ability to recommend your own favorite links on a topic. With our new design, we've made this even easier to use.

To recommend links, you must register and log in at OrganizedWisdom. (We do this to keep spammers from polluting our WisdomCards.)  Registration is free and private, and you will not be put on any e-mail lists you didn't specifically choose to join.

Once you're logged in, just click "Recommend a link" anywhere you see it on a relevant WisdomCard, and you'll be invited to share your favorite resources. Your link will immediately appear in the "User Recommended Links" section, and our Guides will evaluate it for possible inclusion in the main sections of the WisdomCard.

 

We hope you'll use "Recommend a link" often to make OrganizedWisdom a better resource for everyone!

edrugsearch.com Interviews Unity on Health 2.0

edrugsearch.com has been interviewing top leaders of Health 2.0 in an email Q & A format. OrganizedWisdom became the sixth published interview in the series. So far, they've featured Scott Shreeve of Crossover Health , Ed Silverman of Pharmalot, Fard Johnmar of HealthcareVox, Jane Sarasohn-Kahn of Think-Health and the Health Populi blog, and Matthew Holt and Indu Subaiya, the organizers of the upcoming Health 2.0 event in San Diego where we're speaking on a panel.

Cary reached out to us to take our shot at answering her questions. Unity did a great job and I think it's worth a few minutes to read Cary's interview:

http://edrugsearch.com/edsblog/health-20-interview-series-unity-stoakes/

Human-powered search engines offer a fresh experience

Scott Austin, from VentureWire, wrote a compelling commentary yesterday that does a great job of explaining the value of human powered search.

In his article, Trying to kick the Google habit, he says it's great to get 1.7 million Web pages in .017 seconds, but "it's laborious to sift through the results that aren't very organized. I rarely venture past the first ten results, and many of those listings are often stories from five years ago or links to sites that are placeholders for advertisements."

Judging from the dramatic increase we are seeing everyday in the number of health searches being conducted on OrganizedWisdom Health, there is no doubt that consumers are demanding more from their search results, especially when searching for something as critical as health information.

If you are interested in, or still unfamiliar with, the human-powered search movement, it is a worthwhile read.

An Apple A Day, Keeps You Healthy....

Yesterday, we quietly added the updated version of the OrganizedWisdom Health logo to our newly redesigned site along with several other refinements we are making daily based on great feedback and user trends.

For those of you who have been following us from the beginning, (or who have one of our business cards), you may remember our big Red Apple icon. 

To coincide with our other design improvements, we tweaked our entire logo and moved the Apple icon front and center up to our site masthead. (It appeared only in our footer before and incidentally it also appears in this blog masthead, but one thing at a time right:). 

Additionally, we made the apple more natural and healthy.  The new Apple just feels right for our mission to organize the world's best health wisdom. What better symbol for good health and wisdom, right...

We've also added a to the point tag-line (Human-Powered Health Search) to coincide with the more front and center positioning our guide managers and reviewers now get on our WisdomCards.  There is a tremendous amount of work, expertise, and quality control that goes into creating each WisdomCard so we hope these changes help show that we have a team of experts powering our health search.

Please let us know what you think about all of our recent changes...

And for a fun look at how some other companies have evolved their logos over the years, check out this post. 

We're demo'ing at Health 2.0 Spring Fling in San Diego

For those of you attending the upcoming and *recently sold out* Health 2.0 Spring Fling, we'll be there speaking on the Consumers and Providers Connect Panel. We'll be demo'ing some new and upcoming features of the recently redesigned OrganizedWisdom.com, along with a lot of other great companies and people from the "Health 2.0" world. Be sure to ping us if you want to meet while we're there.

It's a Super Tuesday: OrganizedWisdom Health Launches New Design and New Features

What a day...It's Super Tuesday, Mardi Gras, and the New York Giants Super Bowl Parade was today.

But that's not all...Today, we launched a dramatically improved design for OrganizedWisdom Health and several important features that are making it much easier for you to find the very best health information on the Web.

While our growing team of expert health guides and physician reviewers have been hard at work the past few months creating WisdomCards on thousands of important health topics, our amazing design and tech team have been working hard to make it easier for you to use all of the great WisdomCards being produced each day.

We've dramatically improved the WisdomCards to make them easier to read, share with family and friends, and use.  In addition, there are several important new features we're glad to share with you today:

Tabbed Health Search:  For the first time, people can search all of the major health search engines from one place. If we don't have a WisdomCard created yet for your topic, you get our related WisdomCards and a tabbed search interface to make it easy for you to quickly search Google Health, WebMD, Healthline, HealthVault, Healia, Right Health, and PubMed by simply clicking a button. This is a major leap forward in health search and will help people save a great deal of time when searching for health information.

RequestWisdom: We've just launched a new free service called RequestWisdom, so anyone can request a WisdomCard on any health topic. So far people are requesting WisdomCards on everything from their personal doctor, to rare conditions, and local hospitals.  Our health search experts will do the searching for you so you don't have to.

WisdomCard Library: Our team of health search experts and physician reviewers are creating quality WisdomCards faster than planned and we're thrilled.  Check our our growing Library here.

We're still busy tweaking things in the coming days and we appreciate any feedback you may have.  Please spread the word and pass this site on to your family, friends, your doctor and your patients...