Do You Have a Doctor in Your Family?

Since founding OrganizedWisdom two and a half years ago, and launching our Human-Powered Search Service last September, we've been working non-stop to build a new-type of health search service by creating a solution that we actually needed for ourselves and that we would use for our own families.

In a series of posts, interviews and podcasts, we want to share more of our story, and give more insight about how and why we are creating OrganizedWisdom.  We plan to introduce you to more of our experts, guides and physicians behind our service.  And we want to share our experience in building a company we hope will help your family the same way it helps our own.

Do you have a doctor in your family?

This may seem like a weird question. But the point is, there is a big difference in your access to health information if you do or you don't. 

There is great comfort if you have a health professional who you are close to and who you trust, and that you can contact any time of day or night.  It makes a huge difference if you have someone you can ask important health questions to via email or IM and know that you will get a response right away.  And if you have someone you can turn to and know you are being guided to information and resources that will help you better manage your health issue.

If you have a doctor in your family, then you can most likely relate to the great feeling of being able to have your health questions answered at anytime, be guided to resources and information you know you can trust, and have the comfort and assurance that your health is in good hands by someone who cares about you and your well being.  And you also are likely to save a small fortune on your health care costs because of your access to this resource who you can trust.

We bring this up because we're lucky to have several great doctors in our families who help us all the time with health issues.  (In fact, our Chief Medical Officer is Howard Krein, M.D., Ph.D. is the brother of co-founder Steven Krein, and our Medical Director, Scott Pearlman, M.D. is Steve and Howard's cousin). As we build OrganizedWisdom, we are working to build a service that brings to you the same experience we've had in having doctors who are health pros help us.  We are building a service to make the same type of experience available to all.

We want you to say, "OrganizedWisdom is Like Having a Doctor in the Family!"

We are building a service that makes the very best health information and resources accessible, easy to get, and affordable for all. We want you to have access to useful and credible health advice.  We want you to feel that even if you don't have health insurance, you can get health information you can trust, be guided to useful resources, and even ask a doctor or health expert a question anytime of day or night.  Simply put, we want you to say, OrganizedWisdom is like having a doctor in the family.

One service innovation at a time...

When we first set out with the concept of OrganizedWisdom, we knew that we wanted to develop a better solution for organizing all of the best health wisdom so people would have easy and affordable access to the very best advice, information, and health resources.  We found from personal experience that often the best advice came from our family, our friends, from real life experience, and from health experts in our own families.  So we launched a platform to organize all of this wisdom and we started creating what we called WisdomCards. 

As we evolved our service, we realized that the Web already had so much great information and resources from both evidence-based sources as well as personal stories from patients, yet much of the best stuff was mixed in with lots of marketing, redundant content, clutter, and spam sites.  So we quickly improved our WisdomCard concept and launched a Health Guide program introducing our plan of having health advocates, research experts, and physician reviewers, create WisdomCards by organizing and guiding people to the very best health resources and information on the Web. By combining our technology platform with the power of an army of experts, we introduced a new engine to power a series of health services designed to help people.

And so about a year ago, the first Human-Powered Search Service for health was born. And the OrganizedWisdom search service has taken off ahead of schedule to say the least, although we are still in the early stages of our plan. We now have over 12,000 hand-crafted WisdomCards and a team of hundreds of Health Guides working to guide you to the very best health information, advice and resources on the Web.

A service layer, powered by experts

What we're most excited about is the service layer we are continuing to roll out on the OrganizedWisdom platform bringing us closer to our goal of giving everyone easy and affordable access to the very best advice, information, and health resources, just as if you had a doctor in your family. 

Already we've launched new services like RecommendWisdom that enable you to share your own suggestions and recommended resources to improve WisdomCards,  and RequestWisdom, a free service where you can ask one of our Guides to build a WisdomCard for you on any health topic we have not yet covered.  Our Guides do the searching for you and send you a tailored WisdomCard within 24 hours.

But perhaps what we're most excited about is the service we've been testing and improving in a private beta, called LiveWisdom.  LiveWisdom gives you affordable and anonymous access to ask a board-certified doctor or health expert questions about the health topic you are searching via LIVE Chat or email 24/7 from any web-connected computer.

In the coming weeks and months we'll be introducing LiveWisdom to the public.  We'll also be sharing more stories and interviews with the team behind OrganizedWisdom...