The Health Wisdom Blog™ (by OrganizedWisdom)

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.

Request a WisdomCard on Any Health Topic, Doctor, or Health Organization

Great news: Our WisdomCard library is growing faster than planned as a result of the success of our Guide Program and the experts who have joined our team in the past few weeks.  We now have over 1,000 health topics covered and our team of full and part-time guides and physicians are already covering hundreds of new health topics each week.

As you may have noticed, we're beginning to feature some of our WisdomCards on this blog as well as on our new Twitter feed here.

What we're really excited about, is we are starting to introduce new types of WisdomCards that we think will be very helpful to anyone searching for health information of involved in health care (medical professionals, patients, health organizations, health marketers, foundations, etc.).

So now as a new service, you can now request we create a WisdomCard on any health condition, treatment, doctor, hospital, health product, or health related company or organization and our team of physician guided search advocates will do the searching for you and build you a WisdomCard.
 
As an example, if you are an MD, then you know the first place your patients go to find out more about you is the search engines.  If you care at all about your GoogleRank, then it might be a good time to make sure there is a WisdomCard created on you, your areas of specialty, your hospital, etc. Just let us know by contacting us here with the exact name or topic in the subject line.  You and your patients can also contribute by suggesting links to add to your WisdomCard page.

Here's an example of a recent WisdomCard we are working on for Dr. Alan Greene from DrGreene.com. 

Once your WisdomCard is live, you'll be able to promote it by sharing it with patients, linking to it from your Website or blog, and also suggest important links we may have missed. 

And if you are a patient, or are doing research on any new health topic that we do not yet cover, just let us know.  We'll start working on your WisdomCard right away.

We think this will be a very useful service and hopefully help a lot of people so we welcome your feedback as we roll grow it over the coming months.

Send your requests here.

OrganizedWisdom is now on Twitter

Join our brand new OrganizedWisdom Twitter feed where we are just getting started sharing important updates and tweets to many of our most recent WisdomCards:

Click here to see and join the OrganizedWisdom Twitter Feed (http://twitter.com/organizedwisdom).

Is there new hope for ALS?

I was talking with the party hostess when her mom and stepdad arrived. At first, from across the room, I noticed nothing odd -- Stepdad walked with a cane, but that's not out of the ordinary. His wife settled him in a chair right near the door. Then I noticed he was wearing a collar to hold his neck in place. Had he been in an accident? "What's wrong with M?" I whispered to my friend.

"He's dying," she replied quietly. "He has Lou Gehrig's disease." Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis currently has no cure and sentences the person who has it to a life of increasing disability. Some, like famed physicist Stephen Hawking, manage to continue functioning for many years and even remain productive with the help of adaptive equipment.  Others, like my friend's stepdad, go downhill fast.

ALS -- popularly named after Gehrig, the ballplayer who was one of its better-known victims --  is a frightening and often tragic prospect for patients and their families. Today there are several treatments being tested, along with research to find genetic clues and learn more about the mechanism that causes this condition. OrganizedWisdom has gathered the best ALS resources to help you better understand the disease.

Check out the ALS WisdomCard

Photo by ewen and donabel of Gehrig's locker, on display at the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

Dorothy Hamill has breast cancer

Figure skater Dorothy Hamill has defeated tough Olympic competitors, endured two divorces, gone through bankruptcy and fought an ongoing battle with seasonal depression. This week the 51-year-old announced her absence from the next several Broadway on Ice performances because she is being treated for breast cancer.

Fortunately for her and for many women, breast cancer is not the automatic death knell it might once have been. Hamill's representative tells reporters that her cancer has been caught at an early stage, which makes her prospects even better.

The figure skater has been a strong advocate for charitable causes, including the American Cancer Society, throughout her career, and her fan base remains strong more than 30 years after she won Olympic gold. She's planning to be back at work as soon as possible, and I expect she'll also take the opportunity to share her experience as a way of advocating for regular mammograms and early detection. I know I'm pulling for her -- just as I did as a 10-year-old cheering in front of the TV in 1976. (Photo: Paul Shannon)

Check out the Breast Cancer WisdomCard and the Dorothy Hamill Breast Cancer WisdomCard.

Conference Planning Time! 7th Annual ePharma Summit and Health 2.0

It's hard to believe it, but our schedule is filling up fast for next year already.  There are two events in the next couple of months we are really looking forward to: The Health 2.0 Conference and the ePharma Summit.

We know Matthew Holt and Indu Subaiya are hard at work creating a great program and roster of speakers for the second Health 2.0 event (March 3-4, 2008 at the Westin San Diego). And their advisory board is packed with an amazing roster of people which now includes Esther Dyson.  We can't wait, as we'll be unveiling some great OrganizedWisdom developments and news at this event...

We'll also be participating at the 7^th Annual ePharma Summit this January 28-30, 2008.  We had a great time presenting last year and stirred things up a bit with our discussions on Social Media with the pharmaceutical marketers.  There has been so much progress made by the industry in the past 12 months, and there's a compelling lineup of speakers and panelists including Steve Case, Jack Barrette, Peter Frishauf, and Daniel Palestrant, so this year's event should really be amazing and foster some great discussion between Health 2.0 leaders and the pharmaceutical industry. 

The event is at The Ritz Carltion, Philadelphia, PA.  For more information you should visit www.epharmasummit.com.

Hope to connect with you at these events and many others throughout the coming months!

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.

Sites with spirit of Web 2.0 encouraging people to share thoughts on illnesses, doctors

The San Fransisco Chronicle has a nice round-up piece on some of the new Health 2.0 companies working to help patients.

We were happy to see OrganizedWisdom featured along with several other great companies.

Read the article, titled For these startups, patients are a virtue here.

Google Health Executive Adam Bosworth Leaves, Heavyweight Marissa Mayer Takes the Helm

Google's health initiatives have been a mystery for many months now.  That's because they keep talking about the importance of organizing health information, but to date we haven't seen any major new products launch or acquisitions take place. 

So what does this week's news that effective immediately, Google exec Adam Bosworth has left the company, mean to the future of Google Health?

For starters Google's head of the core search group, Marissa Mayer will (at least temporarily) take the helm. Which is probably a good sign since she is one of the most influential and important executives on the Google team. The company is clearly taking this change seriously, whether Bosworth's exit was expected or not. 

In our opinion, having Google in the game promoting innovation in health care is a great thing.  They have the talent and deep pockets to promote great ideas, entrepreneurs, and new companies. This is not only a great thing for their company, but also for others in the burgeoning Health 2.0 space because we all benefit when we are propelling each other forward.

Having Google paying attention to health care innovation is also critical to health searchers. With so many people starting their search at Google now, it is essential that visitors get credible, quality search results. 

As we have blogged about extensively about this trend (here, here, here), because the quality of search from resources like Google is now in shambles.  Spammers, clutter, and marketers are really taking a toll on the quality of their search results, especially in the area of health.

We hope and look forward to Google continuing to innovate in health care and support other companies that are working hard to find better ways to solve these same challenges.

Only An Inch Down The Road Of Organizing The World's Information

Seth Godin has a great post today about the numerous opportunities and need to better organize information today.

It's easy to be wowed by what a magical job the search engines do in finding you just the right needle in the haystack.

The fact is that search engines are very good at fairly simple searches, and very good at finding information about single products, services, people and ideas.

But they're terrible at connections, at rankings, at horizontal results. They can't help me find the 25 most important up and coming artists in the United States. They can't help me find six products that are viable alternatives to something that was just discontinued. They can't help me rank the service of four accounting firms.

People are starting to organize real estate data, entertainment content, and reviews in really interesting ways.  And a few new health companies (including OrgnaizedWisdom Health) are just getting started at organizing the world's health information. There's a seemingly endless amount of work to be done, but thanks to the power of collaboration and social media we have a feeling things are about to get a whole lot more useful in how people find the most useful health wisdom and resources.

Look for our official OrganizedWisdom announcement about how we intend to solve this problem later this week.

New Facebook Group for Health 2.0

Even though Matthew Holt's upcoming Health 2.0 Conference this month is sold out, you can still participate by joining the new Health 2.0 Group on Facebook here.  Looks like there are about 63 members already, and I'm sure by the time the conference ends there will be several hundred more. It doesn't look like there is much activity yet, but it looks like it could be a useful communication tool for all of us in the space.

OrganizedWisdom Featured in The Economist: Health 2.0 Picks Up Steam

The past 18 months or so have been a tremendous whirlwind of innovation, trial and error, new ideas, change and progress in the online healthcare space -- what many now call Health 2.0.

Dozens of new companies have launched and secured funding from venture capitalists. Consumers continue to use the Internet as a critical tool to manage their health care.  We now have our own Health 2.0 conference this month that is sold out! And the most influential media outlets are now covering this trend.

This week's Economist Magazine has a full-page trend piece by Jeanette Borzo titled, Health 2.0: Technology and society: Is the outbreak of cancer videos, bulimia blogs and other forms of “user generated” medical information a healthy trend?" which OrganizedWisdom was happy to be featured in.

From the article:

To gauge the size of this snowball, look at OrganizedWisdom, a firm based in New York. It launched in October 2006 as a health-care Wikipedia of sorts: a site to which consumers could contribute their own nuggets of health wisdom. Yet after only a few months it transformed itself into an index of the existing web content. The firm's founders had discovered that there already was quite enough user-generated health information online; the real problem was finding the good stuff.

The explosion of user-generated content in health care is, in part, the result of broader internet trends: more and more people have broadband access and the tools for creating content are getting easier to use. New software, for instance, makes it easy to launch and maintain a site such as FluWikie (which provides information about preparing for an influenza pandemic), and digital cameras make it a snap to take and upload photos of, say, epigastric hernia surgery.

But there are other drivers, too. Those with multiple chronic conditions, such as diabetes and depression, or lesser-known illnesses such as chronic fatigue syndrome, are anxious to get tips from others in similar situations.

Other Health Bloggers who we respect have already been blogging about it (here and here) and with the upcoming Health 2.0 Conference (which we'll be speaking at), we suspect there will be a lot more conversation this month on the topic of how technology, social media and collaboration can help improve some of today's most challenging health care issues.

Seth Godin And Squidoo Finally Respond To SPAM Problems

Seth Godin (prolific blogger, author and the founder of Squidoo) finally responded to the problems his company has been having with SPAM web sites.

An email sent out today from Seth Godin and the Squidoo team to thousands of their members says "Last week, a few dozen spammers exploited Squidoo and drove the rest of the Web crazy. They spammed tens of thousands of blogs and built thousands of worthless lenses, violating our Terms of Service with reckless abandon."

The reality is, spammers and search engine optimizers have been using Squidoo for over a year to help spam the Web.  It's disconcerting that Seth (the author of Permission Marketing and once vocal opponent to SPAM) would minimize the seriousness of the problem by passing this issue off as the work of a few bad apples.  In our experience using Squidoo to search for quality health information over the past year, it often seemed as though nearly every lens was questionable at best.  So much so, we finally stopped using the site.

So according to today's email and this post on the Squid Blog, here's what they have done to try and win back their credibility and fight SPAM on the Web: we've eliminated the tools that bad actors used to damage the rest of us. We've also added a squadron of people who hand review lenses, and we’ve made it easier for you (and anyone else) to report spam.

Is this too little too late?  We'll give Godin and Squidoo the benefit of the doubt for now, but we're still not using Squidoo as a resource to find helpful health wisdom.  They would have to delete ALL of the SPAM lenses on their site for us to feel comfortable using their service again.  Hopefully their squadron of people will do that soon.

Microsoft Dives Into Healthcare And Acquires Medstory

Some highlights from Steve Lohr's NYTimes article, Microsoft to Acquire Health Search Engine:

• The Medstory purchase, according to Microsoft, was a first step in a broader company strategy to assemble technologies that will “improve the consumer experience in health care.
• The Microsoft move comes at a time of increased investment in online health ventures, rising traffic at consumer health sites on the Web and profits at the most popular sites.
• WebMD, the leading health-related site, last week reported strong quarterly profit of $8.9 million on revenue of $80.6 million, surpassing Wall Street’s expectations. The stock price of WebMD — an Internet pioneer in health information that struggled for years — has surged in the last year.
• Aging baby boomers, fond of personal choice and technologically literate, tend to want a say in their treatment decisions. And the Internet is already an important source of health information. Eight million people in the United States go online for health information every day, according to a study last year by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, a nonprofit group.
• The longer-range goal is to link personal information like age, sex, drug regimens, family history and even genetic markers to search. The ideal is that search results are tailored individually, identifying treatments, drug interactions and medical journal articles of interest.

Physicians Are Encourgaged To Embrace Trend of Online Social Networking For Health

A new article  just out on CMP's ConsultantLive.com, a leading site for primary care physicians highlights the trend of online social networking and features OrganizedWisdom among others who are helping to develop tools and sites to foster these communities.

Online Social Networking Brings Further Change to Doctor-patient Relationships by Sara Selis, Online Associate Editor, CMPMedica USA.

A new generation of healthcare Web sites is connecting patients to each other, allowing them to share information and advice on virtually any medical condition. Despite concerns over some sites' accuracy and credibility, physicians are encouraged to accept, even embrace, the trend.

The Internet has become such a central part of modern life that most physicians are accustomed to patients coming into their offices with thick printouts of information they've found online.

Now, a new generation of healthcare Web sites, following the "social networking" model of sites like MySpace and Facebook, is taking online health content to another level.

These interactive Web sites (see Related Links) -- ranging from efforts by medical societies like the American Cancer Society and the National MS Society, to venture capital-backed startups with names like OrganizedWisdom, DailyStrength and Revolution Health -- not only provide expert medical content, but also connect patients to each other through disease-specific online communities, virtual support groups, real-time Web chats, and other features whereby patients share experiences and advice, and even rate their doctors. Many of the sites feature educational videos and health-assessment quizzes. Others offer an online "personal health record," along with tools that track patients' health goals (such as blood sugar and exercise goals) or send users e-mailed reminders to get recommended health screenings.

As these sites move into the mainstream, they're affecting how patients get health information and advice, how they manage their medical conditions, and how they interact with their doctors.

Click here to read the complete article on ConsultantLive.com.

Digital Healthcare and Productivity Features OrganizedWisdom

We're starting to get a lot of traffic today from Matthew Holt's article in Digital Health and Productivity, "MySpace for Healthcare? It's closer than you think."

Even though few people can clearly define Web 2.0, many of its emerging components such as blogs, wikis, video-sharing – social networking activities -- have made millionaires of a whole new breed of geeky entrepreneur. Google paid more than $1.6bn for YouTube. By some accounts FaceBook is valued at over $600 million. And the $580 million News Corp. paid for MySpace looks like a bargain.

Does the social networking trend matter in healthcare? Several new companies are betting the answer is "yes."

Our friends over at Revolution Health, DailyStrength.org and Sermo are also included in the article so we're in good company. 

What's great to see is that each of our respective companies are offering a different approach to social networking and health.  Sermo for example, is the leading community now for physician experts and peer to peer review, while DailyStrength has improved the health forum concept for support, and Revolution seems to be going wide trying to tackle everything from personal health records to health telephone services.  And as the article points out, OrganizedWisdom is creating a community of patient experts and health connectors who are building a knowledgebase of "WisdomCards" and user generated health content that is aligned with evidence-based health content from Healthwise.

The article concludes:

The model is convincing enough that last week Sermo raised a second round of funding of $9.5m, while both OrganizedWisdom and DailyStrength already have raised smaller amounts. It seems that venture capitalists, at least, think social networking in healthcare is well on its way.

We would like to congratulate Sermo on their big news and we look forward to working along with all of these new health 2.0 companies to continue to bring fresh ideas and passion to healthcare and health communities.

Read the complete article here.