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?

Browse our new slideshows: famous fictional shrinks, celebrities with mental illness, and the best foods for your mood.

Sometimes you're itching to read and research, sometimes you just want to flip through pictures and captions. We know. We're like that, too. That's why the OrganizedWisdom team is so happy to announce the arrival of our latest project -- slideshows.

Here are our first three installments. Happy browsing:

Famous Fictional Shrinks
They can make you laugh, they can make you cry, but they can't actually write you a prescription. From Dr. Melfi to Frasier Crane, you're sure to find your favorite on-screen psychiatrist on our list.

Celebrities with Mental Illness
Everyone has their ups and downs. It's reassuring to know that even the biggest stars are no exception. Find out which conditions celebs like Mel Gibson, Axl Rose, and rapper DMX deal with daily.

The Best Foods to Boost Your Mood
Not only are salmon, lobster, and chocolate delicious, they're natural "uppers." Be sure to add these foods to your grocery list for the ultimate feel-good pantry!

(Be sure to drop us a line here if we've missed any great items in our lists above. Thanks!)

Have you had these questions? Now, we've got answers!

 Have you ever wondered:

• How will bipolar disorder affect my relationship?
• Is gaining weight part of bipolar disorder?
• Why do I have trouble sleeping?

If you're one of the 5.7 adult Americans with bipolar disorder, these are likely the same questions you asked when you were first diagnosed. And how do we know that? They're some of the questions we see coming up in the search queries we look at every day, and we thought it was time they got answered!

You see, OrganizedWisdom is taking our focus -- helping people find the health information they're seeking -- to the next level. Our new Frequently Asked Questions section (see our first installment, Bipolar 101) invites doctors and other qualified medical professionals to help answer these hot questions while directing users to WisdomCards loaded with helpful resources.

We invite you to flip through these new FAQs, tell a mental health professional you know to submit a response, and share with friends or family members who live with this condition.
 
And don't forget to tell us what you think. Please share your feedback here!

OrganizedWisdom is Hiring Health Writers, Bloggers and Assistant Editors

OrganizedWisdom has an extreme commitment to quality.  Everyday we are looking for ways to improve our service. One initiative we are focused on is to add more great health writers to our team.

We are currently hiring great health writers, assistant health editors and health bloggers. 

You can learn more about the opportunity from our job description here.

Candidates should have at least two years of professional writing and editing experience, ideally covering health and wellness. Preference will be given to those with online journalism backgrounds and/or blogging experience.

Apply here.

How OrganizedWisdom is Dealing with the Economic Downturn: An Extreme Focus on Quality

Every company today is reviewing its strategy, goals, and budgets to adjust in this economic environment.  Our approach at OrganizedWisdom is very much the same and we thought it might be helpful to discuss the process we went through and the outcome of our review.

As entrepreneurs who lived through the dot com crash (as a publicly-traded company no less), we knew we needed to take this opportunity to review EVERYTHING very seriously. While the market had its worst month ever, OrganizedWisdom had by far its best month ever on every metric we track (i.e. unique visitors to the site, revenue, pageviews, WisdomCards published) so we asked the team two important questions: what can we do more efficiently and what can we do better?

We are fortunate to have raised a round of financing from an extraordinary group of investors a few short months ago and have always run a hyper-efficient operation (thanks to our "$0 Dollar Office" model). As a result, we are able to build our business with a very low burn rate.  While there wasn't anything major we had to cut from our budget we asked how can we improve our operation.  Not necessarily by spending less, but by taking action on things that will improve our product and our process.  We looked for opportunities to simplify, to leverage technology in more efficient ways, to save time, to train and communicate to our team better, and so on.  We ended up with one conclusion: we must continue to focus on improving the quality of our service.  As a health search service there is a high standard for quality and it's our belief that we can do a better job to keep improving our quality.  The more we focus our resources, time, and core team on building the best possible service for helping people find health information, resources and products they trust, the more progress we will make during the downturn.

We learned a lot going through this process. The biggest change was deciding to make sure that every single Guide in the program was the best of the best so that we can focus our efforts on building an elite squad of medical researchers, writers, reviewers and physicians. These changes were imperative so that we can focus on the quality control and product development that is essential for a health search service like ours.

The other big changes have to do with improving our process to make it more efficient.  A review of each of our systems helped us find ways to make our technology faster, improve our service and find ways we can work together as a virtual team more effectively.  The good news is that because we've been operating all along in a very efficient manner, we only had to make limited changes.  We are fortunate that our strategy enables us to focus 100% of our capital on talent, as opposed to offices, operational infrastructure, servers, computer equipment and so forth.  We are investing in a team of people who have one goal: building the best health information on the Internet.

We sincerely hope sharing a bit about how we are managing our company during today's changing economic environment will in someway be useful to you.  What others have shared has certainly been valuable to us. These are uncertain times, but we're optimistic about the innovation, passion and progress we see everyday.  It's a big mission to change healthcare, but there are hundreds of other companies and thousands of people working on the same mission.  Now that is change we can believe in...  

Follow OrganizedWisdom on Twitter, Get Our News First

We'll be releasing some big news about OrganizedWisdom this Wednesday and we are announcing it first to our Twitter followers.  You can follow us at http://twitter.com/organizedwisdom.

You can also follow the tweets of several team members including:

Unity Stoakes: http://twitter.com/unitystoakes
Steven Krein: http://twitter.com/skrein
Zach Mayberry: http://twitter.com/zachmayberry
Emily Lapkin: http://twitter.com/emilylapkin

OrganizedWisdom Gets Ready for Health 2.0 in San Francisco with Big News

Are you going to Health 2.0 in San Francisco this week?

We are...and we're thrilled to be presenting for the third time at this event. In fact, we're the only company to be chosen to speak at all three conferences, an honor we are very proud of given the influence and impact Health 2.0 has marshalled since its inception.

If you are planning on attending the conference, or happen to be in the area this week, we hope to connect with you in person.  Come see us speak, give us your feedback, and let us know how we're doing.    

This Wednesday, our Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Howard Krein will be presenting how OrganizedWisdom has changed health search by organizing hand-crafted search results for the long-tail of health topics...the way most people actually search today.  The panel called, Search in the Long Tail & Intelligence in Communities, features several of the the most important companies and thought leaders in the Health 2.0 space including:

• West Shell, CEO, Healthline Networks
• Tom Eng, President, Healia/Meredith
• Venky Harinarayan, Co-Founder, Kosmix/RightHealth
• Steven Krein, CEO, Organized Wisdom
• Daniel Palestrant, CEO, Sermo 
• John DeSouza, CEO, MedHelp
• Bill Allman, GM, HealthCentral
  
• Ben Heywood, CEO, PatientsLikeMe

Much of the promise of Health 2.0 is in searching for and finding exact, personalized health information content, especially for rare or hard to categorize conditions. Much of that information is in social networks, on blogs, in forums and other hard to find communities where great health information is being shared everyday. Matthew Holt & Indu Subaiya will introduce a new framework looking at the evolution of search into the long tail. And we're excited to participate and show exactly how our WisdomCards work to guide people to this hard to find content.  We'll even be showing some top secret data from our search logs in real time so attendees can see exactly the types of topics that make up the long tail for health search.  You'll be amazed at what you see.

And on Thursday, we'll be participating in a very fun panel called the Health Search Bakeoff, being moderated by Craig Stoltz.  We'll be showing the audience exactly how people use our service to find what they are looking for by conducting live searches after being given a random health search by the panel.  This will be a great way to show off how our expert guides are able to hand-craft exceptional results and guide people to the very best results on over 20,000 WisdomCard topics.

We're also excited because we have some big news we'll be announcing on Wednesday morning via this blog and live from the conference floor.  Our twitter followers and blog readers will get the news first of course.  It's big news that is going to make a huge impact on health search as well as health professionals. More details on Wednesday...

We'll be out and about Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday and looking forward to meeting you in person or hearing your feedback.  We'll be taking lots of video and pictures to post on the blog too.

Q&A With OrganizedWisdom's Chief Medical Officer, Howard Krein, MD, PhD

When we set out to create a human-powered search service for health, our goal was to create a service that doctors would recommend to their patients and families to use.  Quality control and credibility has been the essential focus of our team ever since we launched.  From day one we have worked with doctors on all aspects of our product development to make sure we are building a service that can be trusted and will be most useful to people.

Our Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Howard Krein, is responsible for shaping our quality standards.  He works closely with our Medical Director, Dr. Scott Pearlman, and our physician review team to make sure we build a service designed to help the most people.

We thought it would be helpful to post this recent Q&A interview we did with Dr. Krein to give our users more background about his thinking and share his insights into the OrganizedWisdom quality process and why he believes it is so valuable to integrate experts and doctors into the process of guiding people to better health information.

Question and Answer Interview with Dr. Howard Krein, Chief Medical Officer, OrganizedWisdom.

   1. You've said that OrganizedWisdom is like having a doctor in the family.  Can you share what you mean by this and describe some of the ways OrganizedWisdom is helping people manage their health?

         One of the interesting things that happened as I went through medical school was my family and friends started to call me with healthcare questions. They were looking for guidance in navigating topics that were sometimes complicated but always important. If you ask any doctor, they'll tell that the same thing happened to them... It's one of the perks of having a physician in the family.  The advantage of having someone close to you who is knowledgeable, always available and accessible to answer healthcare questions is a benefit few people enjoy. As a physician, you are limited in being available to your patients at that same level. At OrganizedWisdom, we are dedicated to bringing that same level of accessibility of healthcare information to people all across the world. Our goal is to provide easy access to quality healthcare information to everyone all the time. When we do quality reviews of our WisdomCards, we look to make sure all the information that I would want my family to have about a topic is represented on the Wisdomcard. This is one of our standards.

Several months ago, I bumped into a friend who told me “I almost called you the other evening”. She went on to tell me that she was diagnosed with a thyroid mass and although her doctor answered the questions she asked, when she got home that evening she thought of more questions. Instead of just calling me, she went to OrganizedWisdom and found all of the answers to her questions. This crystalized the standard we are shooting for so we can help more people by providing instant access to quality healthcare information and you trust, anytime day or night.

And as we innovate we keep going back to this concept of creating a service that is like having a doctor in the family.  Our new LiveWisdom service is a great example of this because it makes it easy for people to chat LIVE with doctors directly from our WisdomCards.

   2. What's the role of the Chief Medical Officer at OrganizedWisdom and why did you decide to join the team?

When Steve Krein and Unity Stoakes (Steve is my brother and co-founded the company with Unity Stoakes) were starting OrganizedWisdom, they came to me and asked for guidance about what they were building from a medical doctor's perspective.  They were trying to create something radically different and more useful, but wanted to make sure they were building a service that doctors would want to recommend to their own patients.  So joining OrganizedWisdom was a no-brainer for me because I had so much confidence in the team and the vision. As a physician, I spend much of my day as a patient advocate and educator, so this opportunity is a meaningful extension of what I already do. I feel very lucky to have the ability to be involved in a company that strives to provide the best health information and resources to anyone who needs it.

Being Chief Medical Officer at OrganizedWisdom means that I am ultimately responsible for setting the quality and accuracy standards of our service.  I also work with our Editorial Director, Guide Manager and Medical Director in overseeing the quality controls and training programs for our physician reviewer and guide programs. As a practicing physician, I understand what patients need and want because I am interacting with them everyday. Our goal is not only to provide all of the pertinent information on healthcare topics and resources, it is also to make sure that information is the up-to-date and the best that’s available. That means that on top of creating hand crafted search results (WisdomCards), we constantly review and update these WisdomCards. That’s the OrganizedWisdom difference.

The OrganizedWisdom team starts where traditional search engines end. We take the best of what’s out there, and make it better.

Finding quality healthcare information shouldn't be a time-consuming process. We are solving this problem by adding the wisdom of trained expert search guides and physician reviewers to the power of computerized search tools and social bookmarking sites. This human-powered model helps us deliver far superior health search results by eliminating search index spam from low-quality websites, links to duplicitive libraries of licensed health content or potentially dangerous web sites.

   3. What feedback are you getting from your patients about OrganizedWisdom?  Do you have any examples of how people are using the service?

It's amazing to hear how helpful OrganizedWisdom has been for so many of my patients! As a practicing physician at an academic university (Jefferson University Hospital Philadelphia, PA) I have the privilege of being part of a busy practice.  Along with trying to answer all the questions my patients have, I feel I have the responsibility to help them find quality sources to answer questions that come up after they leave my office. OrganizedWisdom has given me the service that I have always wanted to share with my patients so they could help themselves.

OrganizedWisdom gives physicians the ability to send patients to a website that reviews and organizes the best information online thereby allowing people to continue to educate themselves and help them get a clearer understanding of their health questions. In addition, patients who use OrganizedWisdom prior to coming into our office feel that they are better prepared to engage in a quality conversation regarding their issues…and this can be very helpful.

    4. What feedback are you getting from other doctors and medical professionals about OrganizedWisdom?

Feedback from other healthcare providers has been very positive. As I mentioned, whether patients use OrganizedWisdom before or after a visit, there seems to be a perceived benefit by most healthcare providers I have spoken with. Having a free service that provides patients with easy access to the best information available in easy to navigate Wisdomcards, helps patients to prepare for their appointments and helps streamline some to the conversations that must take place. This is advantageous to both the patient and provider. I have also gotten feedback that many providers use our site as a starting point for their own searches.

   5. OrganizedWisdom has been working hard on a new service that will give people instant access to chat with a doctor from a WisdomCard.  Can you tell us about this new LiveWisdom service and how do you think it will help people?

I believe Live Wisdom is one of the most exciting developments in healthcare today. We believe that asking doctors questions should be easy, affordable, and accessible to all.  LiveWisdom gives people the access that they want to physicians and healthcare providers anytime day or night.

No longer will people have to worry over an unanswered healthcare question, even if it is in the middle of the night. Whether a person has insurance or not, whether they have a primary care physician or not, whether they are employed or not, we are making sure they have access to affordable, vetted, healthcare information from medical doctors and health experts.  Although there is no replacing visiting your own doctor, we are going to provide qualified and professional physicians to help bridge the gap between what you know and what you need to know.  No longer will someone have to wait till their physician calls them back to get answers.  The LiveWisdom physicians are informed experts who can help you understand conditions, medicines, and answer your questions.

With the click of a button, people will gain access to information that will help them make better healthcare decisions and possibly help facilitate a more productive visit with their own physician.  As we role out this new innovation in health information I think its becoming easier to see why OrganizedWisdom truly is like have a doctor in the family.

   6. Can you give some insight to how OrganizedWisdom will continue to evolve?

At OrganizedWisdom, we are constantly making improvements and enhancements. Healthcare and health information is not static so we are always looking to provide the most useful resources available. By staying active in academic medicine I have to be aware and understand theses changes. Our team and I continually discuss how we can make OrganizedWisdom even better and more useful to people. I ask my patients, as well as our users, what they want and how we can make the site better. So, how we evolve, partly depends on what users need.

Currently, in addition to LiveWisdom, we are adding additional features such as EmergingWisdom, WisdomCollections designed to make it easier for people to find what they need.

   7. What are you most excited about in the Health 2.0 space that you think will have a true impact to improve the lives of your patients?

I am excited about all of the inovation and entrepreneurialism that is pushing the industry forward.  We are in a stage where we are making dramatic leaps and bounds because new ideas are getting funded, new thinking is helping break down old barriers, and ultimately Health 2.0 is changing the way people access health care and health information.  This is a good thing for all of us.

   8. Tell us about your medical background and what made you want to become a medical doctor?

Becoming a physician was sort of a circuitous path for me…I always had an interest in medicine but initially wanted to be a scientist. After college, I decided to pursue graduate school and I earned a Masters degree in Neuroscience and then a Ph.D. in Cell and Developmental Biology. During that time my interests evolved to include clinical medicine. I then earned my M.D. at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia (one of the oldest medical schools in the United States). I stayed in Philadelphia for two internships (Emergancy Medicine and General Surgery) as well as a residency Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery.  I finished my training by completing a fellowship in Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at MCV/VCU (Virginia Commenwealth University) in Richmond Virginia. After teaching and practicing in Virginia as a Clinical Instructor at both MCV/VCU as well as at McGuire Veterans Medical Center I returned to Philadelphia and took a position at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital as a Assistant Professor.

9. What's your favorite feature on OrganizedWisdom and why?

My favorite feature is LiveWisdom and I think it will have a dramatic impact in helping people get affordable access to doctors to ask their questions.

Esther Dyson Interview About Health 2.0 and Why She Invested in OrganizedWisdom

We recently had a enlightening conversation about health 2.0, technology and innovation with Esther Dyson (seen to the left flying! Picture courtesy of Zero-G).  We've posted the highlights of our discussion below. 

We're thrilled to have Esther involved with OrganizedWisdom as both an investor and on our board of advisers.  Esther is one of the best known and most respected names in high-tech. She's a long-time catalyst of start-ups in information technology. Since the early 1980s, she's been closely involved in dozens of major development in computing technology and her insights have been a great guide to the future of technology innovations and their impact on business, society and individuals.  Esther's primary activity is investing in start-ups like OrganizedWisdom and guiding them as a board member. She specializes in online services and, more recently, IT and healthcare/genetics, and space travel.

Esther is an early investor and sometime board member of numerous successful technology companies including 23andMe, Medstory (which was acquired by Microsoft), PatientsLikeMe, Meetup, and Flickr and Del.icio.us (which both were acquired by Yahoo!) just to name a few. Esther is also on the board of advisers of the Health 2.0 Conference.

Unity Stoakes: As active investor in so many health companies and an advisor to the Health 2.0 Conference, you have a great perspective on new start-ups just launching.  What trends and innovations are you most excited about?

Esther Dyson: The thing that excites me the most is all the research and discoveries that are being made around genetic information. That's just part of something even broader, which is – there's gonna be a lot more information available.  We'll be able to understand the impact of treatments, and the relation between treatments, conditions, environment...We're gonna know a ton more. 

Unity Stoakes: What opportunities do you see for innovation or improvement with health search over the next few years, and really what do you think needs to  happen to make health search more useful to the average person?

Esther Dyson: Well, right now you're reading a lot about behavioral targeting of advertising; the notion is: You track someone's behavior online, you collect a lot of data and you can show them more relevant ads.  Imagine if, instead of tracking someone online without them necessarily knowing, you could ask someone, "Will you give us your health information?"

Then, instead of showing you more relevant ads, we can also show you more relevant content. And ideally, there's a difference between, "Oh, this guy goes to the travel site, let's show him an airline ad,".... and the guy who, in some form, tells the system, "Oh, I'm traveling to Paris next week," and you can show him an offer for 20 percent off on a flight to Paris.  That is not targeting, that’s actual personalization of the message to the person's specific circumstances.... In the same way, you can give them specific health care advice. We don't just guess you have headaches; we know the specific condition that is causing those headaches so we can personalize the content and make it more useful.

Unity Stoakes:  You've been a board member or early investor in so many innovative Internet and technology companies [23andMe, PatientsLikeMe, Flickr, Del.icio.us, Orbitz, Meetup, Medstory and dozens of others].  What lessons do you think health care companies could be learning from these types of companies to help people better manage their health, reduce costs, create a better health care system?

Esther Dyson: Well, certainly, one big area is the sharing of information, the sharing of experience, and people's interest in looking at their own data. On Flickr, you share photos.  You also look at your own stats: "How many people looked at my photo?  How many people thought it was interesting?"  On the medical side, that's somewhat akin to PatientsLikeMe. People might say, "Well, Flickr's frivolous, and PatientsLikeMe is serious."

But it's still a natural human instinct that information about yourself is fundamentally more interesting than information about other people. As people look at more health information, it's got to foster healthier behavior. As people pay more attention to their personalized health information, and as they generate more information to look at, we will have much more information to do research on, and figure out what the correlations actually are between behavior and genes and exposure to environmental things, and various kinds of diseases, and also which therapies are good for them.... Just as we are seeing on sites like Flickr where it's really about sharing, people are just beginning to feel much more comfortable with going online with creating data, looking at data, and are no longer as scared of all the stuff as they used to be. This won't happen all overnight with health information; it just takes time.

Steven Krein: What do you think happens in the market with the creation of new content, and new answers, and new information that could be made available as a result of now giving people so much more information that they’ve never had about themselves before?

Esther Dyson: Well, first, I'd word that differently.  I wouldn’t say people are being given more information, I'd say people are getting more information. They're actively going out and getting it.  It's not just lying around.

Unity Stoakes: We're very honored to have you as an investor in OrganizedWisdom, and on our advisory board.  We're very early on in our evolution, and what we're building, and obviously very proud of our mission.  What did you see that helped you decide to work with and invest in OrganizedWisdom?

Esther Dyson: I saw that people are confused, and OrganizedWisdom is providing information that's relevant, rational and useful. Over time, I see this being expanded as well, to become a more personalized service as we've talked about.

Steven Krein: How do you explain OrganizedWisdom to others?

Esther Dyson: Well, interestingly, it's kind of like what Yahoo was, originally, in that it's not only a search tool.  It's a structured information source.  Unlike Yahoo, you actually produce the content, you don’t simply select it, and that gives it a certain consistency of quality.  It's health information that's organized and reliable, which is still hard to find.

Steven Krein: If there was a feature that you'd love to see integrated into OrganizedWisdom one day, what would it be that you think would make our service better?

Esther Dyson: Well, probably it would be something that looked at your personal health record and gave more personalized results than just what you search for.  For example, you feed in a list of the drugs you're on, and it would give you information specific to the conditions that those drugs normally treat.  It would also give you alerts when new relevant information appears somewhere.

 

Unity Stoakes: Health care seems to have been under focused on and under funded compared to other technology sectors. Are you seeing that shift now?

Esther Dyson: I'm seeing lots of regulations, legacy institutions and broken incentive systems; investors have been reluctant to go into a market where you often don’t get rewarded for doing the right thing.What's happening now is that a lot of the old systems are being eroded around the edges by  the new stuff.

Everything from "Minute Clinics", where people are simply saying, "I don’t want to deal with your reimbursement procedures." They don’t want to deal with all the bureaucracy.  "I'm just gonna go to the clinic and pay my forty dollars and get a prescription so that my kid isn't gonna suffer. Just treat the symptoms of the flu that my kid has, or check out his earache, or whatever."

Some people are opting out of the insurance program altogether, not because they can't afford it, but because they don’t want to deal with it. There are lots of people who need their health insurance and it's a useful thing, but the world is changing rapidly, and I think finally some of the institutions are going to respond. Investors are going to respond to that, too.

Unity Stoakes: Any thoughts on the election?

Esther Dyson: Yes. Both candidates have health plans. But neither of them is addressing all of the issues  It's not just about who pays;  it's about what they pay for. You need to pay for health, not for care.

Steven Krein: How does that happen?

Esther Dyson: It happens when you start paying for the difference between the expected outcome, and the actual outcome.... Take, for example, a hospital, and this is a real thing going on right now.  Say there's a hospital related infection. Somebody goes to the hospital, they have some procedure done, and they end up with an infection because of unsanitary practices in the hospital.  That happens all the time.  The hospital ends up treating the infection, and then getting paid more, because, hey, they treated this guy, they had to give him lifesaving meds, whatever.  So nobody in a hospital is trying to get people sick, but it does happen, and they get paid more when it happens.

Now, the payers are beginning to say, "We will pay for the heart procedure, but we're not going to pay for the hospital bill – the infection."  And suddenly, hospitals are realizing, "Wow,  we're not trying to get people sick, but we have to really keep them well or we're not gonna get paid."

Suddenly, you see better outcomes.

Steven Krein: And which candidate is more aligned with that philosophy, even though neither of them is talking about it?  Which do you think is better from the health care side of things?

 

Esther Dyson: I don't really care about health care.  I care about people.  I wouldn’t pick a candidate on who is better for the health care industry.  I do think Obama understands how you can use new technology more effectively.  I think McCain is a wonderful guy, but I think Obama just looks more into the future, and that’s what we need.

Steven Krein: Any last words of wisdom that you'd like to share with the industry, specifically the Health 2.0 industries?

Esther Dyson: The real message is that this is worth doing, it will take a while, and the more information the people have, the better decisions they’ll make.

Unity and Steve: Thank you very much for a great conversation.

Esther Dyson: Thank you both.

OrganizedWisdom Launches LiveWisdom in Public Beta: New Service Helps People Chat Live With Doctors From WisdomCards

OrganizedWisdom is very excited to announce that we have just launched the public beta of LiveWisdom, a new service that enables anyone to connect LIVE via chat with board certified doctors, health professionals, and health advocates for an inexpensive per minute access change.

The LiveWisdom service, which has been in private beta since it was first previewed at Health 2.0's Spring Fling in San Diego, officially went live on hundreds of OrganizedWisdom WisdomCards late last week and over the coming weeks we plan to integrate the service into thousands of WisdomCards where people will find it most useful to ask doctors questions about the topic they are searching on.

Test the LiveWisdom Service:

HIV, Birth Control, Erectile Dysfunction Treatments, Chickenpox

Why Live Wisdom?
We launched LiveWisdom service because we believe that asking doctors questions should be easy, affordable, and accessible to all. Even if you don't have health insurance. And especially if you don't have easy access to experts anytime day or night when you may have an important health question. 

In fact, as we integrate new features and services into our WisdomCards our goal is for you to feel like OrganizedWisdom is like having a doctor in your family (see our related post titled Do You Have A Doctor in Your Family). The LiveWisdom service is an important part of achieving this mission.

Does LiveWisdom Replace the Good Old-Fashioned Doctor Visit?
LiveWisdom does not replace the need to visit with your doctor in person, especially in the case of a medical emergency.  LiveWisdom is a complementary service to seeing your own doctor and lets you chat or email with medical professionals to ask them questions.  In fact, depending on the health issue or your specific questions, it may be likely that the doctors will advise you to see your doctor or go to an emergency room if they think it is necessary. 

Affordability, Anonymity and Access
There are three great benefits to LiveWisdom that we believe will help a lot of people.  First of all because of the unique low-cost per minute charge, it is possible to have your helath questions answered for only a few dollars. This means that anyone can afford to use the service even if you don't have health insurance.

The service, now in public beta, also enables people to chat with doctors anonymously and in a private forum.  There is no link between the information you provide the doctor you are chatting with and the account you set up to use the service.  They won't even know who you are other than what information you provide. We believe this will help many people who may want privacy, anonymity or not feel comfortable speaking to a doctor in person about certain questions. 

Perhaps the greatest benefit of the service is the access it provides people to medical professionals and board certified doctors. Any time day or night, seven days a week, you will be able to chat live with a doctor and ask them questions.

How to Use the Service
To have a LiveWisdom chat session with an expert, you must be on one of our WisdomCards that features the LiveWisdom service as pictured above. The experts who are available for Live Chat have a flashing orange/yellow "Contact Live" button next to their listings. You may want to browse through the listings of a few of the available experts, view their profiles and compare their ratings.

To enter a Live Chat session, click on the "Contact Live" button that is located next to the expert of your choice. You will be asked to register to become a member of LivePerson (a public company whose technology runs the LiveWisdom service): it’s simple and there`s no obligation. You will be asked to accept the LivePerson legal agreement and submit your billing information. Your card will not be charged at this stage.

Click on the "Start Session" button to open up the Communication Center. You will not have to download any software in order to chat live. Please wait a few seconds for the expert to respond. The session begins in free mode. You can click on the "Hire Expert" button when you are ready to begin the paid session. To quit, simply click the "Quit Session" button.

If the expert is unavailable, the following message appears: `Sorry! This expert is not available at this time`. If you wish, you can send the expert an email inquiry by clicking the blue "start an E-mail Session" icon.

Just the Beginning...
We'll be showing off the LiveWisdom service much more in the coming weeks and months as we work to integrate the service across our WisdomCard Library.  We'll also introduce you to several of the doctors and experts and share feedback and more testimonials from people who have used the service.

In the meantime, test the service for yourself and let us know what you think.