The Wisdom of Patients

Respected health economist Jane Sarasohn-Kahn and the California Health Foundation have published an inspiring new report with a title I love: The Wisdom of Patients. Sarasohn-Kahn investigates the ways social media are empowering patients and providers to collaborate in new ways -- a collaboration we often call "Health 2.0." Among her findings:

  • People in search of health answers are often willing to trade off aspects of their privacy if a site makes clear how their information will be used.
  • Online social networks can be sources of misinformation, but good online communities are self-correcting.
  • Consumers are smart enough not to rely on a single source of information on health topics.
  • Emotional support is nice, but online health audiences want information first.
  • Consumers will pay for online health content they perceive as trustworthy and valuable to them personally.
  • As a business, Health 2.0 is still emerging, with a number of different models in use.
  • Health 2.0 is a disruptive force, changing the interactions among patients, physicians, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals and other actors on the healthcare stage.

The report also includes profiles of Health 2.0 players like diabetes blogger Amy Tenderich and Matthew Zachary of I'm Too Young For This!. Well worth reading -- download it here.

OrganizedWisdom Hiring Health Writers

The OrganizedWisdom Health team is growing and we're thrilled with the people joining the human-powered search movement each day.  We're assembling an amazing team of Online Health Advocates, Expert Searchers, and Physician Reviewers, and we continue to add more Health Guides to our team all the time.

We are also looking to hire great Health Writers to work on some exciting projects related to our WisdomCards.  If you are an experienced medical/health writer/blogger/journalist with exceptional grammar and ability to write about complex health topics in a way that most people can understand (USA Today vs. Scientific Journal style), then we want to speak with you this week.  We're looking for people who have a passion for writing about a variety of health related topics as well as the ability to write short/snippets packed with useful information. 

If this sounds like something you are interested in, please contact us with a brief resume and some writing samples (links to blog posts are fine too).  Most importantly, we want to hear about why you want to join the OganizedWisdom team.  We're looking for passionate people who care about our mission of improving the quality of online health information and how it is organized.

New, Dynamic Home Page for OrganizedWisdom

New_ow_homepage
We've been doing a lot of great work here at OrganizedWisdom, if I do say so myself, and this week we launched a new home page that gives us more of a chance to showcase that work. New features include:

  • The latest Health News WisdomCards
  • Showcases for sponsored "decks" of WisdomCards
  • The most recent WisdomCards in each category
  • Refined and updated category list
  • Featured WisdomCards on important or timely health topics

As always, we invite you to search for health wisdom on our site, and Request Wisdom if you don't find what you wanted. Thanks for visiting!

Will the future of health search be mapped to your DNA?

We think so. And we'll be speaking more about this concept tonight on a panel with John Doerr called Personalized Genomic Health: New Paradigms, New Industry. 

The discussion is about new paradigms with personalized genetics.  We are going to be introducing a concept that I think will have a dramatic long-term impact on education/personalized information especially as it relates to health search.  Today we have local search, and we have tailored search based on your interests and behaviors.  And we have algorithms and we have expert guides. It starts to get even more interesting if you consider this: the new local search will be information/education and search results that are actually personalized to your DNA/Genome.  I think it is a big idea that OrganizedWisdom will be working on in the coming years to help people get better health information tailored specifically to their needs and interests.

If you're in NYC, hope to see you at the event. There will be a lot of discussion around this concept and it's implications. If you can't attend, feel free to share your feedback or ask questions in the comments...

Personalized Health Information Based on Your Genome

Navigenics Health Compass is launching this week in NYC at a series of events and panel discussions called DNANYC.  OrganizedWisdom Health is thrilled to participate on the panel Personalized Genomic Health: New Paradigms, New Industry this Thursday evening.  Steven Krein will join John Doerr, David Agus, MD, and Dean Ornish MD  to focus on the impact these new services will have health care services and health information.

As more people use services like Navigenics Health Compass or 23andMe.com, they will need personalized information and education to help them better understand their genomic report. One reason the service from Navigenics is so interesting is because it provides 24/7 access to a team of Genetic Counselors to help explain what your genetic analysis means and support you in knowing how to take next steps. OrganizedWisdom is supporting this concept by developing WisdomCards on each of the relevant SNP Codes and health conditions currently mapped by the reports. Get your genome mapped, and use OrganizedWisdom's WisdomCards to research more about each of the specific conditions in your report.

Personalized health information tailored for an individual is here.  Just like people want specific information tailored to their location and interests, they will be able to get education and WisdomCards that map to their human genome. 

Pretty amazing where this is all going.  And it's only just the beginning.   

EconHealth Video: Emerging Models in Health 2.0

OrganizedWisdom's Steven Krein participated on the EconHealth Panel last month moderated by Michael Mason, Health Editor, NYTimes.com.

You can watch the video below of the discussion Steve participated in, as well as get access to all of the videos from the seminar including Steve Case's key note check here.

Panelists included: Raj Amin, CEO and co-founder, HealthiNation; Steven H. Krein, CEO and co-founder, OrganizedWisdom; Daniel Palestrant, CEO, Sermo; Dean Stephens, president & COO, Healthline.

Easy Access to Related WisdomCards

Picture_1 Every WisdomCard on OrganizedWisdom features a handy list of related WisdomCards to help you explore topics that may shed light on your original search.

Now we've moved the top three up to the right column, so you can move right away if you realize that one of these terms is closer to the one you want.

It's a little change, but we like it -- and we hope you will too.

How To Avoid Internet Health Scams - 5 Tips To Protect Yourself From Malicious Health Info

One of the main reasons we decided to build OrganizedWisdom Health is to help people get health information they can trust -- and weed out all of the Web sites that may be malicious, spam index, or out right quackery.

We just published an article on this topic over at Internet Evolution.  You can read the full piece here titled, "Quack Alert: Avoiding Internet Health Scams".

Here are five quick steps informed consumers should take to protect themselves from malicious health information:

  1. Start your medical researching at trusted Health Search engines like OrganizedWisdom, Healthline, or Healia.
  2. Use trusted health sites that have been certified by accreditation directory URAC or feature HONcode seals on the homepage.
  3. Check the source of the information to see if it is sponsored or trying to sell something.
  4. Tell your doctor about the online health resources you typically use and ask him or her to recommend medical resources.   
  5. Ask your local politicians and representatives to strengthen laws against medical fraud and resources for enforcement.

Find What You're Looking For With OW Search Suggest

OrganizedWisdom now offers a "search suggest" feature to help you refine your searches and point you toward WisdomCards you might not even know we had! I could explain how it works, but a picture does a better job:

Search_suggest

Give it a try and see for yourself -- I find it makes my searches on OW a lot faster!

AltSearchEngines: A Chat About OrganizedWisdom with Unity Stoakes

I conducted the following interview with AltSearchEngines.com last week.  Click here to read the complete interview on their blog, but here are some of the highlights:

ASE: OrganizedWisdom Health is an innovative approach to the online search for health info. Can you please talk about what OW is and how the concept was developed/refined?

Unity Stoakes: OrganizedWisdom Health is a human-powered, doctor-guided search service for health. We have a team of expert guides and physician reviewers who create WisdomCards to help people find the best health information, products and services on the Web. We are laying the knowledge, experience, and credibility of experts on top of great technologies to guide people to health resources that will help them.

The concept for OrganizedWisdom.com was developed as a result of our own frustration with health search. A few years ago, my business partner Steven Krein was searching for very specific health information when he and his wife were trying to have their first child. After searching for many hours, they still weren’t able to find the information they needed. What they did find was a lot of clutter, random user generated content and spam Web sites that now get mixed in with all the quality resources. After discussing the problem, we realized there had to be a better way to draw on the collective wisdom of experts, health advocates and doctors, to help filter out the junk. We decided to create a service that guides people to the very best info, resources and services.

So far OrganizedWisdom.com has created WisdomCards for over 15,000 of the most popular health search terms and we plan to cover over 200,000 health topics in the next 24 months for all health topics including diseases, conditions, treatments, drugs, holistic topics, lifestyle issues, and even doctors and hospitals.

ASE: Tell us about the challenge of running a health/medical search engine. It would seem there are more legal issues when people are searching for medical info.

Unity Stoakes: The legal issues are actually not our main concern because we are very clear that we do not provide medical advice and we do recommend people see a doctor immediately if they have an important health issue. Our focus, and main priority, is on quality and credibility. Our goal is to make each WisdomCard exceptional and it must meet very strict guidelines. People often ask how we maintain all of these WisdomCards and how this model can scale. We are able to leverage great collaboration technology, and a distributed team of Guides and Experts, to make this possible. By laying human knowledge with the power of great technology and social media, these challenges become very manageable.

ASE: Was there a steep learning curve for you (re: medical information) when you founded OW?

Unity Stoakes: Many of the people on our team are doctors and health experts. We also make sure to have people working on our team who have been patient advocates and understand the needs from the perspective of people living with a disease or health issue. We do see it as an advantage that when we started the company, we were not health professionals, however, because it gave us the opportunity to think with a fresh perspective. We often meet people who have been in the health care industry for years and they are jaded, or constantly saying why something can’t be done, or how long it will take to fix. Our approach is to think about how it can be fixed — and how we can start making a difference now. We’re trying to look at it from the perspective of a real person needing care or information. We think about the way we want health search to work for us and our families.

ASE: How is searching with OW different than other search engines that provide medical information?

Unity Stoakes: No one really needs 1.4 million Web pages when you type in a health query. People want an organized set of links that guide them to the very best information and resources they can trust. People credible sites and answer their questions. Because our WisdomCards are created by health experts, we are able to filter out all of the junk, clutter, and index spam and guide people to the very best evidence based resources and even user-generated content. We have experts looking at every resource and we are the only doctor-guided search service on the Web.

ASE: What are the most popular wisdom cards/searches?

Unity Stoakes: In the past few minutes we had people search on cancer, ovarian cysts, sexually transmitted diseases, famous people who died of aids, depression, care-giving advice. There is a great variety of health topics that people are searching for and we are seeing many very “long tail” topics. The trends change each hour and very often can be impacted by cultural events, news media, the weather, the season, etc. People often have very specific health issues they are searching for and it can be difficult for them to find credible information in some areas.

ASE: What is “Live Wisdom?”

Unity Stoakes: LiveWisdom is a new service we are building into WisdomCards so people can connect LIVE via chat with board certified doctors, health professionals, and health advocates for only $1.99 per minute. We believe that asking doctors questions should be easy, affordable, and accessible to all. The service is not meant to be a doctor visit, but is meant to be an educational resource for people who may have one or two important questions. The service, still in pilot beta, is private and anonymous as well which we think will help a lot of people get information they otherwise may avoid asking.

ASE: I know that your Wisdomcards are ‘handcrafted.’ Can you please explain what that means- who crafts them? Is that different than other medical web search engines?

Unity Stoakes: Each WisdomCard features an organized set of links that have been reviewed and placed their by a an expert guide who we pay. Other health search engines either use technology algorithms to display their links or they feature licensed content from one of a few evidence-based information providers. Our expert guides are health advocates, patient experts, web researchers, nurses, health professionals, and doctors. We pay people to handcraft WisdomCards because we think that health information is too important to leave to technology alone. We believe that our service approach layered on top of great algorithms is more powerful because our trained experts can actually check each resource to make sure it is useful, credible, and worthy of inclusion on a WisdomCard.

ASE: How much marketing do you do/ what’s your target demographic?

Unity Stoakes: We don’t spend money on marketing actually. We focus all of our energy and resources on creating quality WisdomCards — our content. We are generating most of our traffic from search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN as well as hospitals, health foundations and bloggers who link to our WisdomCards. Our target demographic is anyone seeking health information. About 80% of internet users have searched for health information so it is a very wide demographic. Originally, more women used the site, but it is getting closer to 50/50 now. And the majority of users are between the ages of 25 and 54. But you would be surprised at how many younger people are using the site.

ASE: Who inspires you in the business sector? Personally? Why?

Unity Stoakes: We are big fans of the team at 37Signals and their approach to innovation. Their book Getting Real has been like our business bible. We have learned a lot from them in trying to keep things simple and constantly working to improve our service. Personally, Richard Branson is also a big influence because he is willing to take on any challenge no matter how big — the bigger the better — and fight against the established status quo. We admire people who think big and go big — and never give up.

ASE: When I’m not working I’m….

Unity Stoakes: Hmmm… Is that a trick question? Actually, the truth is we don’t feel like what we are doing is work at all. It is a mission to us. Building OrganizedWisdom is not only fun, but it is immensely rewarding especially when people email you or tell you how much you have helped them.

ASE: Whom are you rooting for in this election?

Unity Stoakes: It is too early to tell. The health platforms have been fairly vague. And our honest belief is that it is going to be up to entrepreneurs and consumers to change health care. We don’t have time to wait for politicians anymore.

ASE: Where do you think medical/health search will be in one year?

Unity Stoakes: Many more people will realize the value of having doctor-guided search. It will be embedded into your hospitals web page, your health foundations web site, and if you have a smart doctor into their personal blog. Sound too dreamy? Not if we have anything to do about it…

Who is OrganizedWisdom?

  • OrganizedWisdom is on a mission to organize the world’s best health wisdom. With your help and a team of expert Health Guides, we are organizing and reviewing the very best health content from across the Web so you can find great health information from credible sources.
  • OrganizedWisdom was started by serial entrepreneurs Steven Krein and Unity Stoakes. Steven Krein and Unity Stoakes are located in New York City, along with our Medical Director, Scott Pearlman, M.D. Our editor, Pat Washburn, is in Wells, Maine, and Chief Medical Officer, Howard Krein, M.D., Ph.D is in Philadelphia, Pa. With an innovative team of developers, designers, Guides and physicians, we're working to bring you a health resource you can use every day.

    Contact Us about any press inquiries, partnership opportunities, general questions, comments, and feedback.

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