We're happy to be one of only six companies from more than 50 attending Health 2.0 to be featured in David Hamilton's VentureBeat post today titled: Six Health 2.0 firms reinvent doctor-patient ties.
Here's a snippet from the post:
OrganizedWisdom already has an established presence in Health 2.0 with its “human-powered” medical search engine, a Mahalo-like
attempt to bring expert attention to search requests. The startup
essentially lets people search through precompiled “wisdom cards,” each
vetted by medical experts, that list reliable resources on diseases and
drugs along with recent news headlines, treatment alternatives, support
groups and message boards, and research findings.
OrganizedWisdom now plans to supplement that information with a new
service it calls Live Wisdom, in which anyone can chat online with a
medical professional for $1.99 a minute. CEO Steve Krein demonstrated
what he described as an actual chat between a patient just diagnosed
with laryngeal cancer and a doctor, in which the two discussed
treatment options and probable outcomes — and even the physician’s
response when the patient asked, “Am I going to die?” (The cure rate
for an early-stage cancer turns out to be pretty good, the doctor
replied.)
We all may be getting tired of the endless debates and media coverage for the upcoming presidential nominations, but in our opinion there still hasn't been nearly enough discussion about health care policy given the importance these issues have on the daily lives of so many American families.
Our friends at HealthCentral.com have just launched a great new tool that outlines each of the candidates' positions, and lets you see how they rate relative to your own thoughts on the issues. They also have some of their expert bloggers participating. I guess it will be up to us bloggers and Health 2.0 companies to make sure this issue stays front and center...
We've published an article today about the power of human intelligence when combined with great technology over on Internet Evolution, a new site about the future of the Internet.
The beginning of the piece below, click thrugh for the full article...
The race for the ultimate online
search engine continues to unfold as engineers, math geniuses, and
computer scientists work to create more efficient and accurate search
tools. But a new crop of search services are taking a much different
approach: combining great technology with the power of human
intelligence.
In recent years, the hottest Web companies have put endless efforts
into creating innovative search technologies and complex algorithms --
the computer programs that index the Web and seek to match your search
terms to the most relevant sites. Google is perhaps the greatest
example, and its algorithm is helping the company try to achieve an
awe-inspiring mission: to organize the world's Web information.
Yet, in the past year, it has become clear that even these
complex algorithms have their limits. Faced with a tsunami of new Web
pages, user-generated content, and black-hat search engine optimizers
constantly trying to "game" the algorithm, it has become increasingly
difficult for algorithm-based searches to effectively sort through the
clutter on the Web. As a result, users waste time searching, and often
become frustrated because they never find what they are looking for....Click to read the full article.
The American College of Physicians published a useful article this
month in ACP Hospitalist listing some of the most useful health Web
sites that patients and medical professionals are now using to get
health information.
Jessica Berthold's article, Smart surfing: Finding the best medical Websites, points out that "patients aren't the only ones doing the Web surfing. A 2006 article in Postgraduate Medical Journal
found that 71% of health care professionals use the Internet regularly
for medical or professional updating, and 63% recommend Web sites to
patients. The issue for many physicians is not whether to use medical
Web sites, but how to find the best ones."
We were happy to be included in the list of useful sites featured on the list patients are using including:
WebMD Health is an interactive site with information on more than 90 disease and lifestyle topics, and more than 140 message boards.
Daily Strength has support groups for people with more than 500 medical conditions.
EverydayHEALTH is a general medical news site, with health calculators, polls and discussion boards.
OrganizedWisdom selects and organizes user-generated health content from the Web.
Revolution Health
is a comprehensive, interactive site with articles, discussion boards,
disease information and more than 125 consumer-friendly health tools.
We've put our own list together of useful resources our health guides use to find great health resources to create WisdomCards. We are constantly adding to this list so feel free to send us suggestions.
I don't know about you, but when I hire someone, or go to the doctor
or the architect or an engineer, I could care less about how good they
are at memorizing or looking up facts. I want them to be great at
synthesizing ideas, the faster and more insightfully, the better.
Until just recently, law students had to learn a painstaking process
to look up cases by hand. No longer. The academy realized that teaching
students to be great at Lexis was a smart idea.
Best line:
Selecting the facts is an important part of the process. Finding them shouldn't be.
This week a bunch of bloggers started talking about the definition of Web 3.0, debating everything from the proposed definition, to announcing that it is non-sense to even be discussing the definition.
The definition of Web 3.0 doesn't matter much at all. What does matter are the results of continued innovation.
And we believe the result of continued innovation online means a new crop of human-powered and machine supported services designed to provide better information, improved quality, more relevancy...and ultimately a whole host of new opportunities for knowledge workers.
Thanks to Web innovation, collaboration tools, and social media we are entering the age of Social Services. And that is a good thing for us all.
That's because people + machines are more powerful than machines on their own. People know how to see things that machines can't and vice versa. People know how to make judgments in a different way. People know how to organize information using common sense, while machines have all sorts of other abilities like sorting through massive amounts of information quickly to find useful patterns.
One theme that we have been preaching since the inception of OrganizedWisdom is that much of the innovation that is happening today, and that will continue to happen, is not the result of new technologies alone, but rather the new service offerings that people start providing using these new technologies. It's the People Powered Movement.
Mechanical Turk is a great example. And Wikipedia is perhaps one of the beset examples of this trend...a bunch of people working together with the power of the MediaWiki platform. Seth Godin has written about the need for People Powered before, and most recently Jason Calacanis suggested the same in his definition of Web 3.0:
"Web 3.0 is defined as the creation of
high-quality content and services produced by gifted individuals using
Web 2.0 technology as an enabling platform."
Perhaps Malcom Gladwell summed up the thought best in a recent interview:
"Google in a sense is a symbol of the solution to an old problem. We
don't need more Googles; what we need is a way to prioritize and
analyze and make sense of the information we have at our fingertips.
And maybe those kinds of solutions aren't technological at all. I'm
quite prepared for the possibility that the next revolution is not
going to come from a machine; it's going to come from creating a more
thoughtful work force and giving people the opportunity to be
thoughtful."
No matter the definition of Web 3.0, 3.1, 4.0 or whatever, the future of innovation is how we empower the power of people's wisdom with great technology.
As we were perusing our log files seeing, we ran across people coming from this very interesting blog called BoogieJack that had a nice short review of OrganizedWisdom Health
He writes at the end of his post..."Among my minor maladies is tinnitus. I learned more from a half hour of reading the search results for that term than I learned in several hours of scouring the search engines a while back. I bookmarked it, you'll probably want to as well."
Thanks BoogieJack (it's sure is fun to write that word!)
The folks who produce the Digital Health Revolution over at ScribeMedia created a well done video titled the History of Medicine to help kick of yesterday's Health 2.0 conference in San Fransisco. Click here to check it out.
We've heard that there will be a number of segments and interviews from the conference that will be coming soon...
There's another interesting survey from Burst Media which tells us more of what we already know:
People are going to the Internet first to search for health information.
In fact, the research shows that the internet - rather than healthcare professionals - is now by far US
households' main source for healthcare information, and women more
frequently than men seek such information.
So we know people are going to the Internet to search for health information first. But, are they finding what they want and is the information they are finding credible, trustworthy, and useful?
For those who are adept at searching online, we suspect that they are eventually finding great information. That's because there is so much great health information available online now. There's also a lot of wisdom and practical advice from patients and ordinary people with experience.
But from our experience this information is becoming increasingly more difficult to find. We know because that's what our health guides do all day -- they search for the very best health content, resources, and wisdom to find the very best stuff. The challenge is, it can take hours to wade through hundreds of links to find the very best message board on a topic. Or to discern if a blog post is from a credible source or not. Or to search page after page of search results only to get links to the very same content, but on a different Web site.
The good news is that there are now really great health resources online. Most of them freely accessible and many that have been reviewed by physicians. The key is finding the best stuff.
We're now creating WisdomCards, or search results pages, for hundreds of the most popular health topics. We're trying to do the work for you, and clean up a lot of the clutter along the way.
Over the past year and a half, we have met with marketing executives, compliance officers, and lawyers from more than 20 of the world's top pharmaceutical companies to discuss how they could and should be using social media to join the conversation and connect better with patients.
We felt there was (and still is) a significant opportunity for them to leverage the power of social media to share information and education to try and bridge the massive divide that currently exists between Big Pharma and the people who buy their products.
But meeting after meeting, we would be met with resistance to the effect of, "We don't do social media; We don't want to lose control; We can't use blogs..." and so on.
Being the resilient entrepreneurial types that we are, we pressed on determined to convince these companies that a healthy dose of transparency and openness would go a long way in improving relations with customers. We even developed a presentation called Pharma-Friendly Social Media to try and bridge the gap between these companies and their customers. Still, it was always an uphill battle trying to get these companies to start listening and communicating to their own customers. (If they listen, they might learn about adverse events, which is a big no-no. Then they have to file lots of paperwork and disclose issues that may impact their drugs, etc.).
One of the biggest challenges was that the FDA has yet to issue guidance on how to conduct monitoring and marketing
practices in social media so pharmaceutical companies are unsure how to proceed. And as we quickly learned, no one wants to be the guinea pig with new innovations in the pharmaceutical industry. And for good reason, Big Pharma must be cautious, conservative, and follow the letter of the law.
It is unclear when or if the FDA will issue guidance on the many new issues that have come up as a result of social media, the Internet, and online marketing. Until the waters settle, we recommend each company take baby steps and get involved. Bring your marketing teams and compliance teams together to figure out how to take the first steps.
There's a great article in the September 4th issue of the Wall Street Journal about new services that are helping consumers better manage their medical bills. Several of our good friends were featured including MedBillManager.com, WebMD, and Revolution Health.
We were particularly happy to see MedBillManager featured. If you haven't met Christopher Parks yet, one of the founders of MedbillManager and you care about the Health 2.0 space than you really should. He is one of the most passionate people in the space and he is on a mission to truly improve people's lives based on his own experience and challenges with the health care system when taking care of his parents. They continue to innovate tirelessly and it is great to see their hard work making a difference in people's lives.
Congrats to all featured in the article and we look forward to seeing you a;; at the Health 2.0 conference this month.
For anyone interested in social media, the concept of the Wisdom of Crowds, or the meaning of a flat world, we highly recommend watching this presentation by author Andrew Keen as part of the Authors@Google series. Mr. Keen discusses his book "The
Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture" and he makes a compelling argument for the value of intermediaries in a Web 2.0 world.
Over the past year as we've been building OrganizedWisdom to help guide people to safe, inspirational and credible health information, we've been thinking a lot about this issue and figuring out the best way to tap into the power of people sharing their own stories and recommendations.
The biggest issue has been with figuring out the best way to organize all of the great wisdom being shared across the web, and determining the role our editors, guides and medical reviewers in helping curate all of this information.
These are some of the questions we been dealing with (and continue to deal with) since the beginning: What rules need to be established to guide people to quality information? How do we protect people from spam? What role should editors play? What types of content should be considered user-generated? Is a doctor-video on YouTube user-generated? Should we include links to wisdom that are also promoting a specific product or service? And so on...
Mr. Keen makes some important statements in this presentation about the essential need for intermediaries in a world where everyone has essentially acquired their own "printing press".
To paraphrase, he says in the Web 2.0 world, everyone is able to publish themselves. You don't have to have programming skills to be a blogger. You don't need to have gone to recording school to produce a video. Web 2.0 makes it very simple to create and distribute because it does away with the middleman. And according to many who evangelize the value of Web 2.0, the middleman is bad, corrupt. Gatekeepers are bad.
But, Mr. Keen argues Web 2.0 is not a viable economy because we need middlemen. We need the expert. Whether in marketing, creativity, or content creation, the middleman helps discover the best talent and polishes their work. The intermediaries are the core players in any media system whether Web 1.0, 2.0, 3.0. If we do away with the intermediaries we are undermining media because we are undermining talent. He warns the reality is that talent is scarce. The core value of the ecosystem in media is finding and distributing this talent. The ecosystem is HUMAN. The only way of discovering and polishing the best of the best is a human function. Not an algorithm.
There is a lot we agree with in Mr. Keen's thinking. That is not to say we are not proponents of everyone having the ability to publish, and create, and share. We just agree that there is great value in helping organize, structure, and lend credibility to the best of what the crowds are creating.
Because this flattened media is more open to corruption and lends itself to illegitimate characters gaming the system to their advantage, we are seeing the proliferation of clutter, spam, and junk mixed in with all of the greatness, inspiration and wisdom. How do we know what information is great/trustworthy/credible in a Web 2.0 world being infiltrated by people who are using the same virtues of open media to sell products, manipulate or satiate their ego?
Mr. Keen makes a defense of a media with formal, official, and transparent gatekeepers because he believes "Web 2.0 is too easy to game. To easy to play around with. Too many sites are too easy to fix."
"The problem with this flattened world," says Mr. Keen, "is when you do away with formal gatekeepers, the problem with web 2.0 media is it is increasingly becoming one long commercial break. Increasingly hard to distinguish between paid content and free content. The whole thing becomes one long advert. It is becoming more difficult to distinguish between content and advertising."
We are seeing many of these issues being worked out as communities like Wikipedia institute more guidelines, editorial controls and moderation. But there is clearly a lot more to be done in order to weed out the junk. Social media and collaboration are incredibly powerful, but as the Web expands it is becoming more clear that humans are an essential ingredient in helping monitor, organize and guide us to the very best wisdom of crowds.
"You cannot love a thing without wanting to fight for it." -- G.K. Chesterton
Have you ever been angry at a disease? Sometimes we get angry at the diseases that hurt us, but most often the strongest anger comes when disease attacks someone we love -- especially a child.
The folks at FightSMA are taking their anger -- in this case, at spinal muscular atrophy, a genetic disorder that in some cases can kill children before their second birthday -- and doing something about it. They're angry not just that the disease exists, but that an effective therapy is almost within the grasp of the medical world.
SMA is genetic, and scientists know that at least 7 million people unknowingly carry the marker for it within their DNA. If two of those people have a child together, that child has a 1 in 4 chance of having the disease.
The families and advocates of FightSMA take their fight seriously. They have successfully lobbied to raise the public profile of this illness and raise money for research into its causes and treatments.
FightSMA has been around since 1991, founded by Joe and Martha Slay, whose son Andrew has survived to go to college and become an advocate in his own right. Martha's years of advocacy have helped her forge connections with other "fighters" -- parents of children with serious or chronic illnesses. Online, the FightSMA experience has led to:
FightSMA.org, a site with information about the disease and current lobbying efforts
Fightermom, a guide for family members who take on disease advocacy projects
The Fighting Back podcast, produced by FightSMA member Steve Mullen, highlighting disease advocates and talking about the issues they face
These folks use "Fight" in their name for a reason. They're using different Web "weapons" (blogs, forums, community) to make their case, and they're making a difference. Along the way, they're letting other families in similar situations hear the message, "You're not alone. You don't have to do this by yourself."
Who is OrganizedWisdom?
OrganizedWisdom is on a mission to organize the world’s best health wisdom. With your help and a team of expert Health Guides, we are organizing and reviewing the very best health content from across the Web so you can find great health information from credible sources.
OrganizedWisdom was started by serial entrepreneurs Steven Krein and Unity Stoakes. Steven Krein and Unity Stoakes are located in New York City, along with our Medical Director, Scott Pearlman, M.D. Our editor, Pat Washburn, is in Wells, Maine, and Chief Medical Officer, Howard Krein, M.D., Ph.D is in Philadelphia, Pa. With an innovative team of developers, designers, Guides and physicians, we're working to bring you a health resource you can use every day.
Contact Us about any press inquiries, partnership opportunities, general questions, comments, and feedback.
