There are more and more ways for crowdsourcing clinical questions, and the newest addition to the family of web tools and services is Figure 1, a photo sharing site for healthcare professionals. Registered physicians can share images, learn from others and bookmark useful cases.
I’m not sure this is what the medical community requires right now, but I’m always curious about further developments.
According to the co-founder, Joshua Landy, MD:
“I developed Figure 1 because I wanted a safe way to share medical images with the medical community, while protecting patients’ privacy.”
I’ve written about Curetogether.com several times (1, 2, 3, 4 and 5) since 2008 and it was quite an obvious step that 23andMe, the Google sponsored genomic company acquired them this week. It was obvious because Curetogether has a pro-active community while 23andMe wants to connect genomic changes to different phenotypes or even lifestyles.
It seems we are having more and more community sites these days. Google+ (which can be quite useful in healthcare anyway), then Pinterest and now So.cl, the community site of Microsoft. I liked the name (even if they had to register a domain name of Chile for that), but I’m wondering whether it could be used in medical communication at all.
Now it looks like a playground for the search engine Bing.com, but nothing more. According to Technorati:
Microsoft’s So.cl, pronounced “Social” is a product of Microsoft’s research lab Fuselabs. The site offers enhanced features such as Explore, Feed, Post, Video Parties and the ability to share any web content.
It looks like Microsoft has indeed created its own social network to compete with the likes of Facebook, Google+, Twitter and Pinterest. The timing of the launch is perfect, since Microsoft silently launched So.cl two days after Facebook became a public company.
Do you think it has a momentum in the healthcare space?
Medify: “Our goal is simple: to help you and your family more easily navigate, stay current, and manage the often complex process of finding answers, while empowering you to get help from those you trust most.”
Find The Best: Data driven comparisons of many healthcare-related devices and services such as electronic medical records.
I guess you have heard about HealthTap, I even saw Ron Gutman’s talk at Stanford a few months ago. I’ve never thought that letting patients ask questions and letting physicians answer these questions without providing clear credentials, without knowing or seeing the patient in person is a good idea. To be clear, I think it’s a very dangerous idea, because people will probably use the service and while this Q&A approach would work in all areas, medicine is an exception. Practicing medicine happens in person, through real doctor visits, or even when online communication between doctor and patient is encouraged, a first real meeting is required (remember the model of Jay Parkinson,MD?).
I just found a great article covering this issue. An excerpt:
[U]sers post questions and doctors post brief answers. The service is free, and the doctors aren’t paid. Instead, they engage in gamelike competitions, earning points and climbing numbered levels. They can also receive nonmonetary awards — many of them whimsically named, like the “It’s Not Brain Surgery” prize, earned for answering 21 questions at the site.
So far, so good. But there’s more. The professional credentials of the physician answering your question, such as a board-certified specialty, are not available on the site. Instead, you get a crowdsourced “reputation level” built up by accumulating HealthTap awards, by clicks of approval from other doctors and by other measurable activities at the site.
The advice itself is limited to 400 characters, a length the Times worries is “hardly well-suited for providing nuanced answers to some medical questions.”
More than a year ago, I presented in details DXY.cn, a Chinese medical community site that has over 1.5 million registered users. After that entry, Stanley Li (Li Tian Tian), the founder of DXY.cn, gave me an interview about his idea and the service. Stanley will also attend the upcoming event of the year, Doctors 2.0 and You in Paris.
DXY.com recently conducted a large-scale, online survey of physicians (with 2218 physicians participating) to assess their recognition of the academic marketing approaches implemented by major international pharmaceutical companies. See the results below. An excerpt from the announcement:
International pharmaceutical companies have led the revolution in marketing models and tools. Since the entry of major international pharmaceutical companies into China, the academic style of marketing has gained rapid acceptance throughout the country. However, this “exotic” style of marketing needs to be adjusted to reflect both the unique culture and medical practice approach favored by Chinese physicians. Not all pharmaceutical companies are capable of succeeding at this. Physician perception of seemingly identical “academic marketing” strategies varies significantly. DXY.com recently conducted a large-scale, online survey of physicians to assess their recognition of the academic marketing approaches implemented by major international pharmaceutical companies.
Using your social network, WhichDoc brings together doctor referrals from people you actually know and trust — your friends. The more friends you have using WhichDoc the more referrals you’ll have to help you make these tough choices. Three simple steps create a highly customized list of physicians who matched the criteria you’ve set.
Everyone should be a part of the health and wellness conversation, but not everyone has access to a platform that helps them share their wisdom or learn from others. Until now.
A new site, Hypothes.is, aims to be a peer-review system for the Internet. It will be a distributed, open-source platform for the collaborative evaluation of information and will allow us to parse and critique words across the internet at the sentence-level through community peer-review. (Hat tip: Sciencebase)
It’s a good community concept. The Mayo Clinic has a clear target audience who have a motivation to interact with each other. There is plenty of room for improvement, however. If they were a client, here is what we would recommend:
1) Optimize the journey
2) Confirmation e-mail
3) Platform design
4) Discussion area
5) Social aspects.
Mayo Connect is one of the better online communities launched in recent months. It has a great concept and a good chance of success. Like most communities, however, it leaves plenty of room for both technical and social improvements.
Doctors Global: Doctors Global intends to facilitate physicians to collaborate across all boundaries, to share views, experience and learn new things from colleagues across the world every day in a secure environment.
Comp’act Onair: An evidence-based practice bases clinical decisions on the best available evidence.
We’re pleased to now be taking the next step, creating an online site to connect the global Mayo Clinic community. When you’re facing a health concern, sometimes, what you really need is someone who has already been there. That’s what this community is all about: connecting people who have been through the Mayo Clinic experience with others facing a similar health concern. Each year, more than 500,000 unique patients from every U.S. state and nearly 150 countries visit one of our Mayo Clinic campuses in Arizona, Florida or Minnesota for diagnosis and treatment. These patients, their families and friends, and Mayo Clinic’s 50,000 employees and students are part of the global Mayo Clinic community. This site provides a place for community members to share information, support and understanding.
