The Health Wisdom Blog™ (by OrganizedWisdom)

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 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.

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...   

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.

Important WisdomCard on Lung Cancer

In memory of my Grandfather Hughes, I wanted to share this particularly important WisdomCard one of our Guides created on the topic of Lung Cancer.  When I first found out a few weeks ago that he was diagnosed with with cancer, this WisdomCard was invaluable to me and my family as we searched the Web to find out more information and better understand the situation.

I am thankful to be a part of building something that will truly have a positive impact by helping so many people better manage their health. Everyone needs a health advocate in times like these, and our goal with OrganizedWisdom Health is to help make sure that everyone has access to these types of resources in the future so they can save valuable time getting the best information, resources and services possible.

Please take a look at our Lung Cancer WisdomCard here.

90% of Women Use Internet to Search for Health Info

There's another interesting survey  from Burst Media which tells us more of what we already know:

People are going to the Internet first to search for health information.

In fact, the research shows that the internet - rather than healthcare professionals - is now by far US households' main source for healthcare information, and women more frequently than men seek such information.

Click here to get a lot more of the statistics from the report.

So we know people are going to the Internet to search for health information first.  But, are they finding what they want and is the information they are finding credible, trustworthy, and useful? 

For those who are adept at searching online, we suspect that they are eventually finding great information.  That's because there is so much great health information available online now.  There's also a lot of wisdom and practical advice from patients and ordinary people with experience. 

But from our experience this information is becoming increasingly more difficult to find.  We know because that's what our health guides do all day -- they search for the very best health content, resources, and wisdom to find the very best stuff.  The challenge is, it can take hours to wade through hundreds of links to find the very best message board on a topic.  Or to discern if a blog post is from a credible source or not.  Or to search page after page of search results only to get links to the very same content, but on a different Web site.

The good news is that there are now really great health resources online.  Most of them freely accessible and many that have been reviewed by physicians.  The key is finding the best stuff.

We're now creating WisdomCards, or search results pages, for hundreds of the most popular health topics.  We're trying to do the work for you, and clean up a lot of the clutter along the way.

Here's an example of a WisdomCard we have created on the topic of Breast Cancer.

Here's the same search on Google:

And on Technorati.

We'd love your feedback on which one you would want to send your family to and why or why not?

With so many people now turning to the Internet first, it's essential to clean up health search and give people great, organized results.