Oct 15, 2008

Health wisdom , not just information

I am always on the look out for web services delivering knowledge services in the field of health. I run a non-profit organization, RAKSHA, for exactly this purpose and seek new ways of achieving democratization of knowledge in health.

Organized wisdom is a well thought out web service. This interview with the team at Organized wisdom clearly spells out their views and visions for this knowledge service. The talk with their Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Howard Krein and Esther Dyson , one of the investors was very interesting.




The service claims to be " a free service that provides patients with easy access to the best information available in easy to navigate Wisdomcards, helps patients to prepare for their appointments and helps streamline some to the conversations that must take place."
So, I decided to explore this service logged in as a patient searching for information about my imaginary headache. The first thing i noticed was the cleanliness of the welcome page. Simple, no unnecessary multimedia ( as is VERY often the case with medical information sites) and therefore, fast navigation between pages.

The fonts were friendly, the letters bold and easily legible. It didn't intimidate me, as a patient, with its vastness of information. There was a large search box in a major location with built in prompts via a drop down menu. So far so good.

What really won me over was the neatly laid out information. Not too deep on the first page, just plain English medical speak for an average person.There were links to more scholarly items, but everything i could possibly want to know as a patient was easily available within 2 degrees of separation. There were links to support forums, foundations and drug information ( again in plain English).There were chat rooms, message boards, personal blogs, every useful service i can think of today. They were also initiating a" LIVE chat with a doctor" service, which is now in a beta phase.

All in all, I really liked this service and i am sure something like this will soon be up and running in India, preferably in the Hindi language.
Amen.

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