The Health Wisdom Blog™ (by OrganizedWisdom)

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.

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...   

Speaking at Health 2.0 North East and 7th Annual ePharma Summit

Connecting online is great, but if you happen to be attending one of these events, we'd love to meet you in person to speak about Health 2.0, trends in health care, and how we may be able to work together to keep improving the health care system.

We're looking forward to speaking at several upcoming conferences...we'll continue to post our schedule as it fills up:

Steven Krein will speak on a panel discussion at the upcoming Health 2.0 NorthEast networking event in Boston, on January 23.  Matthew Holt will keynote the event, and Indu Subaiya mentioned she would also be in attendance.  (I am hoping to attend as well along with our Editor, Pat Washburn).

Later this month, I'll be speaking at the 7th Annual ePharma Summit in Philadelphia, PA on January 30th.  The  panel, Social Media, Blogs and User Generated Content: What's Working Today, What Will Work Tomorrow?, will be moderated by Bob Harrell, Director, eMarketing, SHIRE PHARMACEUTICALS.

Panelists include Jack Barrette, CEO, MOVINGHEALTH; Brad Aronson, Executive Vice President, aQUANTIVE, parent company of AVENUE A|RAZORFISH; Melissa Davies, Research Director, Healthcare Practice, NIELSEN BUZZMETRICS; Daniel Palestrant, MD, CEO, SERMO; Kevin Nalty, Consumer-Generated Media Expert, Formerly with J&J and Unity Stokes, Co-Founder and President, ORGANIZED WISDOM.

If we don't see you at one of these events, feel free to follow our OrganizedWisdom Twitter feed and we will keep you updated with our posts.