Thursday, July 3, 2008

Health-care websites finding new life as online interactive communities

By Jay Rizoli, Special to Mass High Tech

Novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald famously averred that there are no second acts in American lives. Not so on the web, where vision, technology and design have combined to produce a more creative, collaborative arena of social networking, blogs, podcasts, wikis and customized search engines.

From Web 2.0 has come Health 2.0, the next generation of health information sites that, beginning a decade ago, initially provided users with static information but that, with time, have morphed into an interactive community of patients and doctors sharing and using health-care records and information.

“There’s an absolutely huge demand for medical information,” said Marlene Beggelman, founder and CEO of Cambridge-based Enhanced Medical Decisions, a developer of automated second-opinion tools whose flagship site is DoubleCheckMD.com. Noting that medical information is the second most searched-for topic on the web, she said, Health 2.0 is “absolutely the logical next step” in online health-care data.

“It certainly wasn’t a two-way conversation in the old days,” said Benjamin Heywood, president of Cambridge-based PatientsLikeMe, which lets users share data on treatments, medications, outcomes and so on. “Health 2.0 is about connecting the users and letting them exchange information with patients sharing the treatment experience. It’s about users being involved in the research process.”

So while the sites are not new, they are considerably more specialized than they were the first time around. Cambridge-based Sermo provides an online community for physicians to share opinions and experiences, and to query other doctors; DoubleCheckMD enables patients to check for potential drug interactions; industry leader WebMD (Nasdaq: WBMD) provides a broader array of services, including a place to store personal medical information. That feature is also central to Google Inc.’s Google Health, which allows users to collect separate health records in a single place.

“Instead of pulling up sites and entering information umpteen times, what if you had a health record online?” said Beggelman, who has expressed interest in connecting DoubleCheckMD to the Google Health network.

At the moment, Health 2.0 is all about possibility, according to executives at several New England-based health web sites. The web is replete with choices in online medical information, and they range in use from WebMD, which claims 40 million hits a month, to the smaller, niche sites that claim users in the tens of thousands. As with anything else, not all sites will survive, and the space has already seen many acquisitions and plenty of venture capital interest. But with voluntary participation and no user fees, where’s the payback for investors?

It’s information, said Marty Tenenbaum, the chairman and founder of CommerceNet who helped launch PatientsLikeMe and Medstory, later acquired by Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT). Patient-volunteered information is not subject to HIPAA regulations, which apply only to physicians and providers, and the potential multimillions of health care records represent an opportunity to do research in a way that’s never been possible before.

“A lot of the Health 2.0 companies are in the advertising space, and I think that’s a difficult path for these types of sites to take,” said Heywood, who notes that the advertising model works for WebMD but adds, “There are not a lot of companies that will make it with that. We’re aggregating data and sharing it with the industry to develop treatments and convey the value of drug development.”

In short, interests such as pharmaceutical, medical device or insurance companies will pay for anonymous information to use in its own research to track drug reactions, side effects and efficacy to draw conclusions that previously might have taken years.   

“We can get real feedback and direct feedback, so we basically structure that and sell that back to them,” Heywood said.

Tenenbaum added, “the things that sites like PatientsLikeMe can do are fantastic. Using the information available you can run an experiment in days that would take a year. For instance, you can tell everyone taking, say, Ritalin to stop taking it for a few days and see what happens.”

But hurdles remain. Medical record interoperability among sites is critical, Tenenbaum says, and the volume of patient information samples must increase to provide statistically relevant packages of information to sell. And, says Tenenbaum, the value to users has to be more than knowledge.

“The ones that are likely to work are the ones that involve money,” he said. “When you show people a set of steps and you say if you do this, this and this you’re going to save 50 percent on your drug — that type of thing, people pay attention to.”
 

Jay Rizoli is a freelance writer in Franklin.