Discovering Medical Tourism

The main problem with medical tourism is the natural feel of isolation that stems from it. By deciding to go abroad, a patient will fill his suitcase with medical reports and cross his fingers to get the right diagnosis. In fact, diagnosis is the tumbling rock of medical travel as people fears to be misled, misunderstood by a doctor that barely speaks English. There are many portsaals to find information about health such as WebMD or Doctissimo (my personal favorite one is intelihealth by Aetna as the information is clearly displayed and very practical).

Several entrepreneurs have worked on projects tying up any individual with genuine experts on a specific medical problem allowing a more effiicient management. We have previously talked about Xoova, an online doctor registry… These Health 2.0 formats are more proactive as they ask an action - reaction process pretty much like a forum with the notable eception that some people are willing to keep their personal health issues strictly private and don’t want 120000 readers to hear about their problems.

In fact, Health 2.0 is different from Web 2.0: the community is in osmosis in optimal Web 2.0 business models (everyone is crearting contents and freely displaying to community members (think about Wikipedia). For Health 2.0 there is the desire to tap the community resource (the doctors, healthcare specialists) without any comitment to the whole community. Health 2.0 is a gated community Web 2.0

Think about a pyramid where doctor are at the top and information seekers at the bottom. To add coherency to the pyramid, Health 2.0 communities entices to create communication between information seekers. This is not a soap opera, there are no triangular relations possible: if a information seeker will contact a doctor the latter will not tell a random community member about their exchange! You have to type of movement within the pyramid:

+ HORIZONTAL –> TO Community members with no medical expertise but a common hardship (i.e. similar health condition)

+ VERTICAL –> TO Specialised doctors able to give hindsight

Here are a few examples of such communities:

 Tau med is still at a Beta stage but is quite interesting. TauMed is a community system articulated around three features: interaction with the community (by asking an open question), share an experience based on a medical experience or question and health videos. Questions a re asked among community members that are then able to vote for their favorite answer or flag an answer if find inappropriate. Community members also have the possibility to create and share their personal care journal (“Health Share”) hence having people discussing their medical issues together (we can ponder over this fact considering one’s desire of privacy when discussing medical issues). Tau Med privileges an HORIZONTAL Communication but is looking into VERTICAL communication.

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 Everydayhealth.com is a large site that reaches over 4.0 million U.S. monthly unique visitors . The site attracts a primarily female, skewing older audience. The site’s audience’s affinities are magazines (Parent & Child, AARP Bulletin, Prevention, Home), retail (Giant Food Stores, Sweet Bay, Ingles Markets, Dollar General) and specialty retail (Catherines, Marshall’s, Sharper Image, Brook’s Running). Everyday health appears to be an information center that features 33 specialized “Health centers” on specific conditions such as depression, diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease. These centers are taking the full scope of each condition: from understanding the condition, to diagnosing, preventive techniques, possible treatments, ongoing management, and related facts. Each center is independantly managed by one specialised doctor establishing a clear connection between a precise health issue and a specialist that can give advice. Hence the website only entices a VERTICAL communication.

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 IMedix is another of those start ups with a very neat presentation. I Medix only functionnality is to have people discussing about their common health troubles and NOTHING else. I don’t see how I Medix can bring up a community with so little functionality and a zero zest of fun. Let’s figure out: “Hi I m John, I’m suffering from the Dawn Syndrome. Namely I am suffering from Dementia… Is anybody there?”… Perhaps somebody will be there but it takes a lot to write about your issues. There’s no positive factor, nothing that really makes you feel willing to participate to the community. Too little elaboration, I don’t like it (still perhaps they ll improve for their official launch…).

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 MedHelp is a first entrant on the internet scene as the company was created in 1994. At that time no Web 2.0, online community blabla. So they started with a simple stone. One of the creator of the website had her mother misdiagnosed during years and when a doctor with the appropriate qualificatfions and knowledge diagnosed her mother it was too late. To avoid this Medhelp intends to connect people with qualified experts on precise health conditions. With the evolution of internet the site has brilliantly evolved spurring VERTICAL and HORIZONTAL communication: you have now Doctor forums (43 forums) co existing with Users community (81 groups). The webiste is now featuring MyMedHelp, an online personalised portal that should focus on the problems you are facing.

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The quality of MedHelp forces me to think that Health 2.0’s new entrants are jumping too quickly to the users and are not trying to build what they really need: an expertise infrastructure that is going to be tested for several years. Tthe point is that such “infrastructure” is expensive and new entrants are more willing to burn their money on web development and online marketing than to create (understably) a backbone with a far fetched return on investment.