Our Mission to Close the “Health Gap”For 5 years,
OrganizedWisdom has been working tirelessly to help solve what we believe to be one of the great challenges of our time: to raise the standard of care by closing the “Health Gap,” the scary space between when someone is left alone with a search box and when they get the assistance of a health professional. With virtually everyone now using the Internet to search for health information, yet only a few thousand doctors actively engaging with patients online, there is much to do to close this Health Gap.
As we learned, there are numerous reasons for the Health Gap -- from constantly changing technologies and confusion about social media best practices, to HIPAA and an HMO-dominated system in which doctors have less time with patients than ever before. All this at a time when fewer people are insured, costs are rising, and patients are left alone to manage their care.
We’ve been working hard to help close this Health Gap by creating new tools and free services that make it easy to connect people to health experts. And we’ve also set out to inspire thousands of doctors, nurses, advocates, publishers, and patient experts to embrace digital media and publicly share their wisdom online for the benefit of others.
We believe that a key to eliminating the Health Gap is to create a public Expert Health Graph that will be open, accessible, transparent, and can serve as a trust filter for the Web.But in order for this system to work, it requires the contributions of thousands of doctors, nurses, advocates, patient experts and other health professionals. The good news is we’ve created an innovative new platform that not only makes it easy for approved health experts and those we nominate to be included to be a part of this Expert Health Graph, but also helps these experts enhance their reputations and increase exposure online by including their shared resources so they can be unearthed and distributed to people who may need them.
Twitter and Facebook Make an “Expert Health Graph” PossibleWhen we started in 2006, we introduced the first human-powered search service for health and created thousands of hand-curated WisdomCards, which organized links recommended by health experts on thousands of health topics. Our search directory and these WisdomCards worked very well, and to this day we feature over 200,000 of these digital digests on popular search topics ranging from diabetes to ADHD. But given the diversity of topics that people were typing into search engines, we simply couldn’t keep up with demand. Millions of search requests were coming in every month on extremely detailed (“long-tail”) topics. We soon discovered that in part because of the widespread adoption of Twitter and Facebook and the public contributions by health experts, we were able to start executing on a new more realistic solution of finding a way to add the wisdom of experts into algorithms. It wasn’t until health care social media started to emerge that we were able to take our vision to the next level by building an “Expert Health Graph” for the web that collects, organizes and promotes the public contributions of thousands of vetted health experts. Now we are seeing these "social search" concepts integrated into Google and Bing, but no one is doing it for health, and until now there has never been a healthf-focused Expert Graph that is open to all.
How a Trust Filter for Health Improves the WebTwo years ago, we had an “Aha!” moment. We realized if we could identify who all of the leading health experts on the web were -- and create a free service that would review and organize all of their public contributions -- we could make this collective wisdom easily accessible to anyone who wanted a more filtered set of resources for health and wellness.
We knew that if we could take a segment of the social graph, and create this Expert Health Graph made up only of vetted health and wellness experts like doctors, nurses, medical librarians and advocates, we could start to build a comprehensive trust filter that would be accessible and open to all.
We soon realized that this Expert Health Graph would not only serve as a trust filter to guide people to great resources, but the data could also be used to identify and transparently signal who these experts were so that people could more easily discover and connect with the best doctors, nurses, and advocates online. By analyzing these shared contributions we could start to create useful expert lists and segments and make this transparent and available to anyone. After all, it’s one thing to search health content online, but imagine being able to find health experts not by searching for people’s names, but instead by searching by topic (which is how everyone searches anyway).
So after months of research and development, we got to work and started mapping the health experts of the web one at a time to create the foundation for this new Trust Filter. Our
Medical Review Board painstakingly reviewed, vetted, and analyzed the online contributions and backgrounds of nearly 6,000 (to date) health and wellness experts in order to identify not just which experts are online, but which health experts are sharing great health and wellness resources online that so we could organize them and make them more easily accessible.
We believe the result of this Expert Health Graph is significant because for the first time anywhere, people can now search for a health topic and not just find related resources, but also discover which experts are connected to that related search query based on the contributions they’ve made online. For the first time there are transparent signals not just about who published an article, but now which experts are sharing or "Liking" an article. By analyzing all of this shared data through the trust filter and making these connections transparent for the first time, we promote those experts who are contributing and sharing online, feature them by topic, showcase their shared links and profiles, and distribute their wisdom more widely in our Expert Health Alerts (
still in beta). It not only gives people a whole new way to find experts, but it gives these experts several new ways to distribute their wisdom and reach those who may need their expertise.
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