OrganizedWisdom Health Blog

OrganizedWisdom Partners With Xtify to Offer Mobile Health Notifications and Close the Online Health Gap

NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwire - February 17, 2011) - OrganizedWisdom, an expert-driven platform for health and wellness, today announced a partnership with Xtify, Inc., a leading provider of smart notification technology for mobile applications, to build a series of mobile health applications. The ongoing initiative aims to close the 'Online Health Gap' by connecting the mobile phones of people interested in specific health and wellness information with the wisdom of vetted health practitioners and patient advocates.

The first application, titled "Healthy Bites," will deliver nutritious eating notifications from health experts directly to consumers' smartphones. Currently available on Android phones nationwide, the application will soon launch on other smartphone platforms. Similar applications relating to common health conditions such as exercise, diabetes, weight loss, heart health, healthy diets, and more will launch in the coming months. The applications are enhanced with exclusive push notification technology provided by Xtify, Inc., which delivers vetted content selected by health experts to consumers' smartphones at the time and place it is most useful, even when the application is closed.

"OrganizedWisdom is on a mission to close the 'Online Health Gap' -- the scary space that exists between a doctor visit and the Internet, where people are left alone with an empty search box and millions of computer-generated results," said Unity Stoakes, president and co-founder of OrganizedWisdom. "This mobile initiative represents an important step in advancing our mission of connecting patients, wherever they are, with the most credible health and wellness experts."

The number of medical professionals actively engaging online has been rapidly increasing, but until now there has not been a reliable method for organizing these contributions. OrganizedWisdom is building a comprehensive Expert Health Graph to collect, organize, and promote these online contributions of thousands of vetted health experts and advocates now actively sharing wisdom across the Web.

"We are so excited to partner with OrganizedWisdom because they fully understand the value mobile technology can bring to helping people get the information they need, whenever and wherever," said Josh Rochlin, Xtify CEO. "Xtify's smart notification technology makes it easy for OrganizedWisdom to deliver the most relevant, timely, and highly engaging expert wisdom to its users, ensuring a guided and helpful experience with each notification."

Xtify's smart notifications are visually rich messages sent directly to a consumer's smartphone based on rules that content editors and marketers define, such as time of day, user responsiveness, user location, and other criteria that ensures delivery of content when consumers are most likely to need and act on it.

About OrganizedWisdom
OrganizedWisdom is on a mission to close the "Online Health Gap" and elevate the standard of care by inspiring all doctors and health experts to embrace the power of digital media and share their wisdom. The company collects, organizes, and promotes online wisdom shared across the Web by more than 5,000 vetted health and wellness experts. The company's investors include leading health, technology, and business minds: Esther Dyson, Roger Ehrenberg, Jason Finger, Linda Holliday, Jerry Levin, Jeff Stewart and SeventySix Capital. Learn more at organizedwisdom.com. 

About Xtify, Inc.
Xtify, Inc. is a provider of mobile technology that helps brand marketers and content publishers deliver highly targeted information to their mobile customers based on users' preferences, behaviors and real-time physical locations. The company is based in New York City and founded by Silicon Alley serial entrepreneur Andrew Weinreich and Jeremy Levy. Backed by venture capital firms Acadia Woods Partners and SeventySix Capital, Xtify leverages a patent-pending technology to efficiently provide marketers and publishers with a unique platform for delivering geo-relevant messages to mobile users. Xtify's platform works worldwide on iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry operating systems, with Windows Phone 7 to come. Learn more at www.xtify.com.

Read press release on Marketwire.com. 

 

Follow Friday: Featuring 5 Impressive Health Expert Profiles of the Week

As we have heard from the highly publicized Chirp conference, Twitter can now boast an impressive 180 million visits a month and 106 million registered users. To cap off these staggering statistics, Twitter is adding 300,000 new users daily.

In the context of health and medicine, this translates into an incredible amount of health information being discussed and recommended among doctors, health professionals, and patient experts continuously.  

OrganizedWisdom recommends these impressive and interesting health experts’ Twitter profiles for this #FollowFriday.

1. @johnlapuma Would you ever believe that you could find an internal medicine physician, a medical ethics expert, and a professionally trained chef rolled into one person? Well, if you haven’t heard of ChefMd, let us introduce you to Dr.John La Puma. This New York Times best-selling author pioneered the idea of delicious food-as-medicine, included in weight loss, cholesterol-lowering, and anti-aging eating plans. Join him for his “What’s Cooking With ChefMD?” or his co-hosted “Health Corner” TV programs on Lifetime.
   
   
2. @wheezemd With record high pollen counts, you are sure to find helpful resources shared by allergist Michael Blaiss, MD. He frequently shares quality health links and expertise in the areas of allergies, asthma, and lung conditions. Dr. Blaiss is past President of the American College of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology and practices in Memphis at the Allergy and Asthma Care Center. 
   
   
3. @MCW_Bioethics  The Center for the Study of Bioethics, Medical College of Wisconsin is committed to guiding health professionals, policy leaders, and community members in the exploration of challenging medical ethics that impact research and our healthcare delivery system. The center frequently shares helpful resources on some of the most challenging issues in bioethics.
   
   
4. @drmintz Matthew Mintz, MD is an internal medicine physician who gives his helpful perspective on recent medical news. He’s an Associate Professor of Medicine at The George Washington University School of Medicine. Visit Dr. Mintz's blog.
   
   
5. @TrishaTorrey Patient exert, Trisha Torrey, is a newspaper columnist, an About.com expert in patient empowerment issues, and an author of You Bet Your Life! The 10 Mistakes Every Patient Makes.  In 2009, she launched AdvoConnection, a directory to help patients find patient advocates, coaches, and health navigators. 
   
   

By: Julie Bohlen, MBA, ELS
     

OrganizedWisdom Launches WisdomCard Alert Service Via Email, RSS and Twitter for 100 Health Categories

We have an exciting new site feature to share and get your feedback on and to be honest I think it's a game changer for OrganizedWisdom: we've just launched WisdomCard Alerts, an innovative new service that makes it easy for anyone to subscribe to our WisdomCard health updates via Email, RSS feeds, and Twitter on over 100 Health Categories.

The free WisdomCard Alert Service is still in early beta, but if you can't tell I'm really excited.  Why?

Because I think it's an incredibly useful service for anyone who needs/wants to stay updated automatically on health information and resources specifically related to any health topic of concern or interest to them or a loved one.  If you are pregnant, for example, you can now use our service to subscribe to our Pregnancy and Childbirth WisdomCards and be updated automatically when our team of health guides and researchers create a new WisdomCard about pregnancy issues.  With the click of a button, you can opt-in and decide if you want to receive a daily email update, ongoing RSS feeds, or Tweets to your Twitter account.

We feature all of our WisdomCard Alert feeds on our WisdomCard Directory and WisdomCollections pages, but in addition what I think is useful is how each WisdomCard features the specific health categories associated with that WisdomCard:

As far as I know, we are the only health service like this where people can subscribe to Twitter feeds related to a particular health topic.  At least for 100 different health categories.  I think it's a great example of new technologies are being mashed up and integrated to make it easier for people to get the health information they need and in the format and medium best for them.

This service is something we've been working on for awhile and we know we have a good deal of work to do. We'd love your feedback and suggestions for how we can improve the service and make it more useful.  Share your ideas in the comments or contact us here.

OrganizedWisdom Welcomes Bryce Addison Krein to the World!

The OrganizedWisdom team would like to send our love and congratulations to the Krein family.  Steven and Rebecca just gave birth to their third baby girl, Bryce Addison Krein, who weighed in at 7 lbs 5 oz this morning at 10:17 AM.  All are happy and healthy! 

In honor of baby Bryce and the Krein family, the team would like to share all these pregnancy and childbirth related WisdomCards!

OrganizedWisdom Creates It's 10,000th WisdomCard

We're thrilled to announce that we recently achieved a major milestone at OrganizedWisdom:  Our amazing team of Health Guides and Reviewers have created more than 10,000 WisdomCards!

Organizing the Web's most useful health resources is a major undertaking, however our goal is simple...to provide the best search service in the world for health by hand-crafting WisdomCards that physicians and consumers will recommend to their family and friends. Each WisdomCard is carefully created and reviewed by our team of expert guides and there is a lot of love and care that goes into creating each one which is why we are so proud of this accomplishment. 

We originally expected it to take a year to achieve this goal, but the success of our growing Guide Program has helped us create more than 10,000 WisdomCards much faster.  We're already working on the next 10,000 most searched health topics, as well as making dramatic improvements and ongoing updates to our rapidly growing WisodmCard Library.

Thanks to everyone of our Guides and Reviewers for working so tirelessly, carefully, and passionately...here's look at our current Top 50 most popular WisdomCards:

1. Pictures of Infant Rashes
2. Exercise
3. Running
4. Diabetes (Type 1)
5. Breast Cancer
6. Ovarian Cysts
7. Lyme Disease
8. STD Pictures
9. Asthma
10. Stroke
11. Breast Calcification
12. Syphilis Rash Pictures
13. Heart Disease
14. Pregnancy
15. Yoga
16. Avandia
17. MRSA Pictures
18. Sexually Transmitted Diseases
19. Skin Rash Identification
20. AIDS
21. Melanoma
22. Depression
23. Skill-Related Fitness
24. Home Treatment for Sebaceous Cyst
25. Abnormal Reactions to Mosquito Bites
26. Applebees Restaurant Nutrition
27. Cramps During Early Pregnancy
28. Celebrities with Autistic Children
29. Pictures of Gout
30. Acne
31. Blood Type Diet
32. Photos of Skin Cancer
33. Bruised and Swollen Top of Foot
34. Rosiglitazone
35. Foods That Act As Diuretics
36. Pros and Cons of Universal Health Care
37. Causes of Swelling in Feet and Hands
38. Famous People Who Died of AIDS
39. Diabetes (Type 2)
40. Spina Bifida Pictures
41. Biliary Dyskinesia
42. Sun Poisoning Rash
43. How to Reduce Swelling in the Foot
44. Shingles Rash Pictures
45. Herpes
46. Physical Stages of Dying
47. ADHD
48. Odds of Miscarriage After 8 Weeks
49. Eczema Rash Pictures
50. Autism

OrganizedWisdom Raises Funding To Scale its Rapidly Growing Guide Program and WisdomCard Library

Well, the cat's out of the bag so to speak...we couldn't be more thrilled about our recent funding news at OrganizedWisdom Health.

We were going to put together a formal press release announcing our recent round of funding in a few weeks but yesterday the news was "uncovered" by PEHub, which found our Form D regulatory filing.

The top blogs didn't miss a second.  Already, there's a write-up in the all-important TechCrunch as well as PaidContent who both got the story from the get-go. Many others are contacting us for more in-depth insight and details.

There's a lot more exciting news to announce, so we'll be posting more specifics soon.  We also plan to highlight the amazing investor group backing OrganizedWisdom, and we'd like to more formally introduce our team, as well as share more details about some of the exciting developments taking shape with what we are building.

As always, please send us your feedback and suggestions.  Thanks again for all of your support as we work on a big mission to organize the world's most useful health wisdom.

Here are links to some of the recent posts:

TechCrunch: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/19/organizedwisdom-the-mahalo-for-health-raises-23-million/

PaidContent: http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-health-searcher-organized-wisdom-raises-23-million-first-round

Silicon Alley Insider: http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/6/new_york_firms_raise_over_4_million

MediaPost: http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.san&s=85461&Nid=44285&p=376200

VentureBeat: http://venturebeat.com/2008/06/20/organizedwisdom-health-raises-23m-for-doctor-guided-health-search/

Private Equity Hub: http://www.pehub.com/article/articledetail.php?articlepostid=12823

Healthcare in a Health 2.0 World and Personalized Genomic Health

Just wanted to let you know about two great upcoming speaking engagements we are speaking at in the next two weeks. One is this week for the Harvard Business School Alumni Association and one is in two weeks where my partner Steven Krein is on a panel with John Doerr, Dean Ornish, MD and David Agus MD.

We hope we get a chance to see you in person at one or both of these events:

Personalized Genomic Health: New Paradigms, New Industry for Navigenics

Thursday, April 10th at 6pm with the John Doerr from Kleiner Perkins, Dean Ornish, MD and David Agus MD.  For more information: http://www.navigenics.com/dnanyc/apr_10.html

Harvard Business School Alumni Association:  "Healthcare in a Health 2.0 World"

Thursday, March 27th at 5:30 with 4 other great panelists including Jacob Goldstein from Wall Street Journal, Craig DeLarge from Novo Nordisk, and John Fedelino from Interbrand Wood Healthcare.  For more info: http://www.hbshealth.org/whatsnew.cfm?CFID=6869878&CFTOKEN=25483#bunny

OrganizedWisdom Introduces LiveWisdom: Connecting People with Doctors Should be Easy, Affordable, and Accessible to All

We've just returned from the second Health 2.0 conference that took place in San Diego earlier this week.  It was a tremendous event with standing room only, as was to be expected given Indu Subaiya and Matthew Holt organized it. 

Over 30 companies presented and hundreds more attended.  The networking was fantastic and we were happy to meet with so many other thought leaders, friends and colleagues in the Health 2.0 world.  Some highlights included Esther Dyson showing us 23andMe in action, spending quality time with Adam Bosworth (formally Google Health now Keas.com), participating in the Unconference, announcing the dCard at the Health 2.0 Accelerator, learning more from Susannah Fox, working with IDEO, catching up with Craig Stoltz, finally meeting David Hamilton from Venture Beat in person, doing video interviews with ICYou.com crew, finalizing details with Cheryl Greene from DrGreene.com, convos with Scott Schreve David Kibbe, and Enoch Choi, hearing from Josh Seidman that the next Information Therapy Conference will be in DC, and having drinks with East Coast friends Bill Allman from Health CentralNetwork, Paul Gollash from Virgin, Jack Barrette from WEGOHealth, Jay Parkinson from Myca. The list goes on and on...

But the highlight for us was presenting LiveWisdom for the first time.   

On stage with AmericanWell and Jay Parkinson, OrganizedWisdom demoed something we are extremely excited about and believe will help change health care forever.  We launched LiveWisdom, a new Live Chat and Email service that is currently in a beta pilot and will soon be integrated on all of our WisdomCards.

LiveWisdom enables people to chat LIVE and anonymously with a board-certified doctor, health professional or health advocate for only a $1.99 a minute.  Yep, $1.99 a minute.  We are brining micro payments to health care so that anyone (insured or not) can at least ask a doctor a question when they need to.  LiveWisdom is embedded directly into WisdomCards so that people can ask important questions or get additional information directly related to the health topics they are searching on at the time.  It's that simple. 

We believe that connecting with doctors should be easy, affordable, and accessible to all.  There are millions of people who have questions they need answered quickly, privately, and from the convenience of their own home.  LiveWisdom is not meant to replace a doctor visit, like the service AmericanWell will provide, but people often have important questions that a live chat with a doctor could quickly answer.  If more information or an actual visit to a doctor is required then we can refer people to American Well, Myca,  a local mediclinic, hospital or doctor depending on the situation.

(Click to read what VentureBeat had to say about our new service).

In the coming weeks, we will be expanding the service and integrating LiveWisdom into all of our WisdomCards so that people who are searching for important health information will now have access to a doctor.  If you are a board-certified doctor or health professional and are interested in joining our LiveWisdom program please contact us at info at organizedwisdom dot com.

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.