OrganizedWisdom Health Blog

We're curating the best health information for you!

At OrganizedWisdom, we've always called the men and women who hand-craft our WisdomCards "Guides" but perhaps we should start calling them "Curators."

Let me explain.

Just like the art aficionados who painstakingly select the masterpieces that will adorn a museum's walls, our Guides carefully assemble WisdomCards full of resources to address the very health topics you're searching for.

And it just so happens that the concept of curation is seen as the next big thing in media. Steve Rosenbaum's recent piece in the Silicon Alley Insider explains that there is a new role for media companies that's all about: "giving folks who don't want to spend their lives looking for an editorial needle in a haystack a high-quality collection of content that is contextual and coherent."

Well, as someone on the inside of a company that's actually been doing this for a few years, it's exciting to see that it's catching on! And as the daughter of someone with a chronic illness, I've never been more convinced that it's absolutely essential, especially in the area of health.

My mother has multiple sclerosis. And every time I try to look something up for her, even as a professional health editor with years of research experience under my belt, I am simply overwhelmed by the amount of, well, junk that I find.

On the other hand, here's an example of one of our WisdomCards on depression and multiple sclerosis.

It has a helpful summary, a few interesting facts, and an assortment of links to quality outside resources, thoughtfully picked by our Guide, and medically reviewed by a physician.

OrganizedWisdom has now curated more than 50,000 health topics just like this. Why don't you let us find those needles in the haystack for you?

OrganizedWisdom Interview on Pharma 2.0

For those of you in the Health 2.0 space that work frequently with or are involved with the pharmaceutical industry, we highly recommend the new blog called Pharma 2.0 - Exploring the Convergence of Social Media and the Life Sciences. The blog is authored by Bunny Ellerin, who is a Managing Director in the New York office of Interbrand Wood.

We recently did an interview (which is posted today) with Bunny about why we decided to launch OrganizedWisdom and tackle some of the biggest challenges in health care, among other topics.  Read the full interview here.

VentureBeat Features OrganizedWisdom at Health 2.0

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.)

Click here to read the complete article and learn about Carol, Myca, AmericanWell, Phreesia, and Pharma Surveyor.

Healthcare '08

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...

Go to www.healthcare08central.com to see where your favorite candidates stand.

The Future of Web Search: Human Power

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.

Finding the best medical Web sites

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.

• The HealthCentral Network  is a clearinghouse of community-focused Web sites sorted by specific conditions (e.g., MyDiabetesCentral.com, MyHeartCentral.com).

• 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.

Selecting the facts is an important part of the process. Finding them shouldn't be.

Seth Godin published an interesting blog post yesterday called The Wikipedia Gap.

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.

Malcom Gladwell: The next revolution is not going to come from a machine.

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.

BoogieJack Saves time using OrganizedWisdom Health

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!)

Health 2.0 Opening Video from ScribeMedia

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...