How J&J Joined the Twittersphere
Marc Monseau, Johnson & Johnson
(14 minutes) watch video

You’ve overslept by fifteen minutes, and you have a killer headache. A couple of Aspirins take care of that. Grapefruit and yogurt for breakfast, a 20 minute jog, and then off to work. You’ve just gotten a promotion and a new office with a gorgeous view, so you’re feeling pretty good about your career. At the end of the day you catch an hour of T.V., hop on the bathroom scale, and hit the hay.

This is the raw data of your life, the cold hard facts of diet, exercise, and attitude that determine your wellbeing, and TheCarrot is dedicated to measuring it. TheCarrot is an online and mobile collection of trackers that collect and calculate data pertaining to a wide range of health concerns. If you’re looking to lose a little weight, plug in what you eat at each meal or log your workout routine. Feeling stressed? You can log and rate your general mood, your quality of sleep, even your job satisfaction. For users with more specialized concerns, there are specific trackers for diabetes, menopause, hypertension, and a sort of WebMD-lite which tracks various individual symptoms.

What distinguishes TheCarrot from similar sites is the focus on mobility and, perhaps more importantly, on a full integration of all the above-mentioned aspects into a gestalt look at wellbeing. The platform’s Iphone app allows users to log in their meals and activities as they happen, even inviting users to upload snapshots of their food into a database. While a seemingly small point to tout, entering the contents of a meal is much easier and salient on the subway ride home than it is hours later, racking your brains for if you had the risotto or the orzo.

The platform’s integration of every tracker into your daily report is similarly based on small, intuitive touches. How many times have you patted yourself on the back for jogging two miles, and rewarded yourself with an ice-cream sundae, or offset a diet with an afternoon sitting around on the couch? TheCarrot, by collecting up all of your lifestyle trackers into one collated chart, stresses the importance of all-around health and wellness.

As Douglas Trauner, CEO of TheCarrot’s parent company, Healthcare Analytic Services, puts it, “until now there wasn’t a mobile, one-stop option for all areas of [health] interest.” This all-in-one, integrated method is what really sets TheCarrot apart.

However, this emphasis on breadth of content may come at the expense of depth in any one area. While the nutrition tracker is admirably well fleshed-out, with a nice range of customization regarding what information shows up on your reports (ranging from a simple calorie count to detailed data on sodium, protein, and more) and a stocked pantry of over 20,000 pre-selectable food entries, other trackers are less comprehensive. It’s great to be able to hold your exercise regimen up side-by-side to your daily diet, but without even giving a broad estimate of the amount of calories burnt by each activity at various durations, the actual functionality is sadly limited.

Other areas of the platform are similarly bare-bones, sometimes in surprisingly fundamental ways. Some, such as Energy Level, Sex, and Job Satisfaction, are merely sliding scales ranging from Low Satisfaction/Energy/Libido to high-a totally subjective criteria that fails to offer much meaningful data. Sleep is structured similarly, with an entirely separate tracker set up for wake-up time. The result is a jumble of trackers ranging from comprehensive and useful, to somewhat confusing, to the useless and/or redundant.

The site and its Iphone companion have undergone a general upgrade since August of 2009, adding numerous features and trackers to its original configuration. While the platform as it is today is far from perfect, TheCarrot’s ambitious scope and convenient, mobile-friendly approach make it a fascinating experiment and a worthy (if flawed) eFitness contender.

One week ago the inaugural e-Patient Connections conference came to an end, and I must say I’m still decompressing and trying to make sense of it all. Many have done an excellent job summarizing the event and highlighting special sessions. To get content summaries you can:

• search Twitter for #ePatCon
• view slides at http://www.slideshare.net/KruResearch/presentations
• view photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/epatient

and definitely read these blog posts Eric Brody, Steve Woodruff, Kerri Sparling, Ellen Hoenig Carlson, BioJobBlog, E-Patient Dave deBronkart.

The highlight for me was the Pecha Kucha session from Dr. Val Jones. Her “Tale of Two e-Patients,” is a great reminder that there is a right way to be empowered and engaged and a wrong way. I was glad I wasn’t moderating that session because I was choked up by the end of her 6 minutes and 40 seconds. Being an e-patient is about being actively engaged yourself; it doesn’t diminish the role or value of your physician.

My only real disappointment was the fact that I started losing my voice the day before the conference even began. I tried my best to mingle and chat Sunday and Monday nights, but each night I had to retreat early to the comfort of hot honey water. I knew having a voice was the most important thing, but felt like a rude host and wanted to spend time with my new friends.

Overall I think we accomplished our goal, which (again) was to bring together health communicators from different industries to compare and contrast the best ways to connect with empowered, digital patients. The term “connection” has a double meaning - connect with patients, but also connect with each other. What delighted me the most was the unpredictable ways connections were manifesting themselves at the conference. I learned from dozens and dozens of speakers and attendees. Some of my favorite moments:

Connections…

“e-Patient Dave deBronkart” publicly thanks Novartis for saving his life.

Yes, the personification of the e-patient movement teaches us that you can be pro-patient without being anti-pharma.

Connections…

From patient blogger Diane Bayer, “…after my talk I sat down in the back and this fellow with a pharma company…he told me he was really amazed by my talk because he has a six year old son who has been diagnosed with autism.  Then he proceeded to show me the pictures of his son…and my god…he looked just like my son!  This person had come for business reasons but then we connected in a very human way. ”

Yes, we are all caregivers, we are all patients; as e-Patient Dave boomed, “Your day will come!”

Connections…

Susannah Fox, from Pew Internet and Mark Bard, from Manhattan Research sharing perspectives on e-patient trends and publicly acknowledging that it’s great to be presenting together.

Yes, commercial and non-profit research can both shed light on the changes around us.

Connections…

There were several tweets and comments about what a great guy Paul Loebach is and how he offers a great face to the FDA. In the breakout sessions he offered some eye opening insights into why the FDA does and doesn’t do certain things.

Yes, even the FDA and pharma folks can connect and gain a better understanding of each other.

Connections…

Jim Currie from “N’Awlins” shouted to me as he was leaving the hotel, “Kevin, my goal is to go back and implement something that is worthy enough to get me invited back to present a case study at next year’s conference.”

Yes, we can inspire and learn from each other.

The challenge of producing a 2-day conference is nothing compared with the challenge of keeping the community alive beyond the walls of the Bellevue. Hopefully we’ve sparked something that will continue to grow and continue to benefit the patients and caregivers who we ultimately serve.

- Kevin

Almost all social media strategists recommend that companies and brands begin their journey into social media by “listening.” But how do you monitor the chatter on 180 million sites, including Twitter, the blogosphere, YouTube and Facebook? And more importantly how do you make sense of the aggregate data?

To answer these questions we used the most advanced, real-time social media listening platform available, ListenLogic. We monitored the social network activity for two competing insomnia products, Ambien and Lunesta, for the month of July, 2009.

Human analysts were used to train the listening platform how to disregard all the spam messages related to “get Ambien cheap” and how to determine if a comment could be considered positive or negative. While other listening platforms only achieve 60% accuracy on “sentiment analysis,” ListenLogic is able to achieve over 90% accuracy in this measure.

The questions we sought to answer were:

1)     What is the total number of comments for each of these brands?

2)     Does one brand have more social media activity than the other?

3)     Which sites generate the most chatter (eg, Twitter, Blogs)?

4)     Are there any people or sites that could be seen as key influencers in the online space?

5)     Overall, are people saying good or bad things about each brand?

6)     Is there a difference in the topics or issues that are being commented on for each brand?

7)     What do the some of the specific comments look like for each brand?

Here’s what we found…

Ambien beats Lunesta 7:1 in Share of Voice

After tracking 180 million websites and cleaning out the promotional chatter, we see that Lunesta had 764 total mentions and Ambien had 5265 mentions. Ambien has been on the market much longer than Lunesta, and in fact is now available as a generic, so it isn’t surprising that they may have more activity on the social networks. But the size of the gap is greater than expected especially given that the two products are roughly comparable in current sales. What would be interesting to see is if the total number of prescriptions for Ambien is seven times greater than for Lunesta-this is data I don’t have.

Twitter Accounts for the Majority of All Online Activity

The data clearly shows that Twitter by far carries more comments than any other social media platform.

Of the 5265 comments for Ambien:

• 3666 (70%) came from Twitter
• 226 (4%) came from ehealthme.com
• 89 (2%) came from bluelight.ru
• 78 (2%) came from community.babycenter.com
• other

Of the 764 comments related to Lunesta:

• 3666 (46%) came from Twitter
• 70 (9%) came from ehealthme.com
• 25 (3%) came from omgili.com
• 24 (3%) came from cafepharma.com
• other

What’s interesting is that after Twitter, there is then a divergence in terms of what other sites are most important in terms of volume. And we can see that for the month we looked at, a full 3% of Lunesta activity occurred on the pharmaceutical rep gossip site cafepharma.com.

No Patient Opinion Leaders Emerge

We dug deeper to try to identify who are the most influential bloggers and Twitterers but no clear pattern emerged. In this particular drug case, in this particular month, there was nobody that emerged high on the “influence scale.”

Ambien Has More Positive Sentiment Than Lunesta

Not only are there a lot more people talking about Ambien than Lunesta, what they are saying is more positive too.

Much of what people say about a brand is neither positive nor negative, so it’s just classified as “neutral.” There are far fewer neutral comments as a percent for Ambien, 41%, than there are for Lunesta which has 84% of all comments being neutral.

For Ambien, 36% of the chatter overall or just over 50% of the non-neutral chatter is positive.

For Lunesta about 4% of chatter overall, or 25% of the non-neutral chatter is positive, with 75% being negative.

Comments Reveal DTC Ad Confusion & Pregnancy Questions

When reviewing the comments for Ambien, many consumers are seeking additional information and clarification.  Common topics:

• Confusion by the Ambien TV commercial and all the side effects listed - with an ongoing debate over whether the ad announcer is saying “aggressively normal” or “more aggressive than normal”
• Confusion exists over the safety of taking Ambien while pregnant, with chatter focused on “new mommy” blogs.
• Others complain about the “Ambien Hangover.”
• 5%-7% of posts discussed “what I did on Ambien” including sleepwalking and unintentional communications.

With less volume, it was harder to pick up trends in comments for Lunesta. What was noted:

• Comments about Lunesta being less effective than Ambien
• Lunesta leading to feelings of depression
• And Lunesta reps (supposedly) chatting on blogs about how to push Lunesta to doctors

Conclusions

First, you must monitor. Our strongest recommendation is that every marketer use a listening platform to monitor social media comments. Marketers have long invested in 12 person focus groups or thousand person surveys; with social media monitoring, you can quickly and easily see the perceptions of a much wider cut of customers. In the case of Ambien you can literally listen in on over 60,000 comments per year!

Second, track macro results over time. With ongoing analysis you will be able to see:

• Is our total number of mentions going up or on the decline?
• Is our share of voice compared to our competition increasing or decreasing?
• Is our positive sentiment increasing or decreasing?
• Does a change in sentiment correlate to a new marketing strategy or tactic?

Third, review comments for actionable issues.
Not every comment or topic will require action, but using Ambien as the example, if a there is an ongoing debate over what the DTC ad announcer is actually saying, you have to wonder if many thousands of other viewers out there aren’t also unclear as to what is being said. This could easily be an issue not picked up by focus group panels, but is revealed when you can listen to 60,000 people.

Fourth, if you promote or engage on just one platform, make it Twitter. We suggest that brands can progress in social media first by listening, then by promoting (one way communication), then by truly engaging (dialogue and relationships). With limited time and budgets, this can seem like an awesome task (how do you respond to various blogs, user groups, YouTube comments, etc.). But we can see that Twitter accounts for the vast majority of user-generated comments. So if a brand is going to promote or engage, focusing on Twitter will cover most of the bases.

NOTE: For more information on the ListenLogic social media listening platform that was used in this study visit: www.ListenLogic.com.

Social Media Faceoff: Lipitor versus Crestor coming next!
Subscribe to the Kru Report at: http://www.kruresearch.com/subscribe

For most health consumers, Healthwise is the biggest brand they’ve never heard of. Even though Healthwise content is accessed over a 110 million times a year, it is accessed most often through online health publishers, health plans, hospitals and disease management companies. Even though this company is over 30 years old, they continue to find innovative new ways to support patient decision making. I spoke recently with Healthwise Founder, Don Kemper.

Kevin Kruse: Don, why did you start Healthwise. It was back in the 70s right?

Don Kemper: That’s right 1975.  During the time of the Vietnam war, I became an officer with the Commissioned Corps of the US public health service.  One day I went to a talk by Vern Wilson, Assistant Secretary for the US Department of Health and Human Services. He said “The greatest untapped resource in healthcare was the patient”. That just took hold of me and I decided that that was something I wanted to work on.

I had a baby at home at the time and somebody gave me the book by Doctor Spock on raising children. I started promoting the idea that we needed a Dr. Spock type book for the whole family that would guide people in how to take care of themselves… this led to the creation of Healthwise in 1975 and then later the Healthwise Handbook.

Kruse: Has the Healthwise mission changed since then?

Kemper: Well the mission hasn’t changed but the media changes. The mission has always been to help people make better health decisions. We did that initially through both the Healthwise handbook and workshop.  So we had a focus on education early on, just wasn’t as scalable as it is now on the Web.

Kruse: Healthwise online content is syndicated by most of the major health portals, how did you become an innovator with web technologies?

Kemper: We have a wind sculpture outside our building that’s devoted to our relentless innovation.  The base of it is solidly in the ground as is our mission which never changes, but that sculpture is always in motion and it means we are continually trying to find new ways to help people make better health decisions.

Kruse: Speaking of innovations, are you embracing social media?

Kemper: We certainly very supportive of the whole 2.0 movement and the social networks around health.  We think there are three sources of information that people need. They need to have information from their doctors, information that has a good solid evidence base, and then they need to hear from other people who have been in similar situations.

The piece that we focus on is the information that is really documented by medical research.  We are really trying to find the right ways to reach out to the 2.0 group, so that we can get those two sources of information collaborating on a more regular basis and I think that’s going to happen in many different ways.

Kruse: Tell me more about your “virtual conversations.”

Kemper: Many people learn best through personal interaction with other individuals and we also know that psychologists have developed a number of techniques like motivational interviewing.

We can now model these interactive conversations by using software developed by Jellyvision, the makers of the computer game called “You Don’t Know Jack”

So instead of having the very obnoxious Jack run the game show we use a very supportive voice and individual called Shelley that guides the person through this interactive conversation.

One type of conversation is around medical gaps mostly in chronic illness. For example the importance of the hemoglobin A1c test for monitoring and controlling your diabetes or the importance of aspirin to a person at risk for heart disease.

The other type of conversation is around wellness.  We don’t have a prescription exercise program, but we have the conversation that will help you make an exercise program work for you. It’s like having a twenty minute conversation with a psychologist around what is it going to take for you to be successful in your fitness program.

Kruse: Shifting to some business questions, how many employees do you have now? And you’re setup as a non-profit?

Kemper: We are a not-for-profit with 120 employees.

One advantage of being non profit is that nobody can come buy us, so that’s good. The not-for-profit approach allows us to play with everybody now because they aren’t concerned that their main competitor might buy us or take us over. We are now used by all ten of the ten largest health plans.

Kruse: What are you future plans for Healthwise?

Kemper: Our next big initiative that we are currently looking for funding and partners for is taking on the whole issue of late life care. We want to use interactive conversation technology to engage elders and their family care givers.  We have identified 26 critical moments in late life care ranging from the early days of just helping prevent falls to deciding when you stop driving, all the way to when do you need to move out of your home, when do you need to put in your advance directives, etc.

We think this will be a highly impactful program that will address what has got to be one of the biggest problems in American medicine; the program is called “Elder Talks.” I think it is going to be a one of our major legacies.

Kemper: Also we have 154 patient decision aids which is by far more than anybody else in the world. These guide the person through clinical treatment decisions like do I need the surgery, do I need this drug, do I need this test, etc.  We’ve had these for quite a while, but we are releasing a whole new generation of them.  The same topics but reformatted into a much more interactive and richer user experience.  Last year we had about 10 million uses of these decision aids, so that they are making a big difference.

Kruse: Great contributions, Don. Thank you.

Kemper: You bet.

Here’s a new video from Kru Research showing that the age of participatory medicine has begun.

Please share, forward, and RT. Enjoy!

Sources used for this video include:

• Kao, Helen, Rebecca Conant, Theresa Soriano, Wayne McCormick. “The Past, Present, and Future of House Calls.” Clinics in geriatric medicine 25(1): 19-34.
• Yawn, B., M.A. Goodwin, S.J. Zyzanski, K.C. Strange. “Time Use during Acute and Chronic Illness Visits to a Family Physician.” Family Practice 20(4):474-7.
• Ley, P., “Memory for medical information.” British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 18: 245-256.
• Rubin, Rita. “Doctors baffled by patients not taking prescriptions.” USA Today 29 March 2007.
• Ferguson T, Frydman G. “The first generation of e-patients.” BMJ 328 (7449): 1148–9.
• Herrick, Devon. “Web Replaces Doctors as Patients’ Top Health Information Source.” Health Care News 01 January 2009.
• Fox, Susannah, and Sydney Jones. “The Social Life of Health Information.” Pew Internet & American Life Project June 2009
• Fox, Susannah. “The Engaged E-Patient Population.” Pew Internet & American Life Project. August 2008.
• Goetz, Thomas. “Practicing Patients.” New York Times 23 March 2008.
• Keckly, Paul, and Laura L. Eselius. “2009 Deloitte Survey of Health Consumers.” Deloitte Center for Health Solutions. March 2009

Vibrant patient communities are the holy grail of health educators and marketers alike. While some organizations choose to throw up a Facebook group, others have decided to create their own destination site. One of the most successful of these is Juvenation.org, the result of a collaboration between JDRF and Novo Nordisk. I recently caught up with the JDRF’s, Rachael Lewinson…

Kevin Kruse:  Tell me about the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF) and about Juvenation.org.

Rachael Lewinson: At JDRF our mission is to find a cure for Type 1 diabetes through research.  So traditionally all of our activities have had a very strong research focus, and in more recent years-although research is still our core mission-we’ve started to focus more on outreach, particularly to adults with type 1.

About two years ago we came up with this idea for Juvenation. The original idea was to provide new opportunities for our great volunteers to connect with each other more readily and freely, regardless of geographic location.  They are our most valuable resource, so we wanted to give them new and better tools to work with.

Kruse:  That’s great. So how did it actually come to fruition?

Lewinson:  We kept trying to get it going internally but we just didn’t have the resources. Then Novo Nordisk approached us after they did the DAWN Youth study, where they interviewed a bunch of young people with diabetes to determine their needs. They found that one of the biggest gaps for them was social and psychological support, so they started looking for ideas on how to meet that need. We had partnered with them on other things in the past, so they came to us thinking that we might be a good partner for that.  They loved the idea for Juvenation and decided to become the founding sponsors.

Kruse:  How does the Juvenation.org site work today?

Lewinson:  We just launched in November of 2008 so we are still adding features, but all the basic functionality is in place, which let’s you create a profile, join discussion groups and forums, accept friend requests and create and comment on blogs.

Kruse:  Who actually built the platform? Did you work with an outside vendor?

Lewinson:  We work with Ignite Health. We are very happy with the work they do.

Kruse:  It launched at the end of last year, what are the results?

Lewinson:  We currently have more than 6,200 members, just from announcing it to our e-newsletter subscribers, Facebook and Twitter followers, and website visitors.  We haven’t really marketed it to the “outside world” yet.

Kruse:  Congratulations.

“We currently have more than 6,200 members…”

Lewinson:  Thank you. And the members are very active on the site. We are approaching nearly 10,000 posts a month. Plus there are also about three to four times as many visitors as members on the site at any given time.

Kruse:  How did you promote the site or how are you getting the word out?

Lewinson:  Well, other than the original kick-off event on World Diabetes Day, it’s been all internal vehicles. We have three different e-newsletter lists that we have put ads in, and we also have an ad in Countdown magazine.  We also gave a challenge to our chapters in May to try and recruit 25 members by the end of the month in order to hit our goal of 5,000 members, and it worked.

We also send announcements through Facebook and Twitter.

Kruse: Other than traffic, have you measured any other outcomes?

Lewinson: Yes.  We have found that people actually improved their diabetes care just in the short time since we launched the site; they are taking better care of themselves.

Kruse: How do you know that?

Lewinson:  We did a survey of members in April.  For half of them, Juvenation.org is the first diabetes community they have been involved in. Some of our findings…

• more than half of the respondants have found the emotional support they were looking for
• 69% feel the site has helped them significantly feel better about Type 1 Diabetes
• 50% say it’s actually increased the attention they pay to their diabetes care.

Kruse:  Has Novo Nordisk been pleased with the results, too?

Lewinson:  Yes, they have.

Kruse:  Any lessons learned from the project or advice to give to others?

Lewinson:  For us, it was important to find a community manager that was already experienced in social networking and respected in the diabetes community. We chose Gina Capone to manage Juvenation because she founded and runs Diabetes Talkfest, another social network, so she is very familiar with the territory.  She in turn has “deputized” some of the more active participants on Juvenation to help her moderate certain groups and make sure we are responding to anyone with a more critical need, like depression or suicide. We have developed policies around those issues and others, and now have a full-scale training for volunteer moderators on the site.

Also, the more feedback you can get from your members and then respond, the better. When we surveyed Juvenation members about what they’d like to see in future versions of the site, most of them expressed frustration about trying to get their friends to understand what it was like to have diabetes. From that feedback we ended up taking a lot of the statements that they were making and made an educational resource center that they can share with their friends.

Kruse: This has clearly been a very successful health 2.0 project. Congrats and thanks for the interview.

Lewinson: Thank you.

Note: Rachael will be presenting the Juventation.org case and answering questions at the e-Patient Connections Conference in October.

To get more great articles, interviews, and white papers subscribe to the Kru Report at:
www.KruResearch.com

Nine years ago, Paul Wessel made a simple connection. His young son, Luke, suffered from Type 1 Diabetes, a condition requiring several glucose readings per day. In order to take these measurements, a small blood sample was fed into a colorful handheld reader that theoretically, was simple enough for a child to use, and appealing enough for a child to want to use it.

However, Luke seemed less than enthusiastic about keeping tabs on his readings. “At about age six Luke began losing his glucose meter way too often,” Wessel related in a 2003 interview. “But he knew exactly where his GAMEBOY was, even if it was under the sofa. So I thought - Why not combine the two devices into one?”

Today, Wessel’s idea has developed into a commercial product due to be released in the U.K., the Bayer Didget. The Didget is a glucose meter modeled off of Bayer’s Contour meter and features a sleek design reminiscent of the iPod. After plugging the meter into a port on a Nintendo DS game system, a diabetic patient can translate consistent glucose readings into videogame prizes, including unlockable arcade-style games in which players can repel alien spaceships. Additionally, the Didget provides access to an online community of other Didget users, fusing the addictive nature of handheld videogames with peer support and additional extrinsic motivation.

The Didget has raised considerable buzz in both the realm of tech-gadget related blogs and the online diabetic community; Wessel seems to have tapped into a need that Bayer failed to initially factor into its product. Designing and marketing an effective glucose reader is merely the first step; convincing a child to actually maintain a regular testing schedule is another. Wessel’s first crack at combining entertainment and medicine was the Glucoboy, released in the Australian market in 2007 after three years of legal wrangling with Nintendo. A clear precursor to the Didget, the Glucboy became the first piece of medical hardware licensed to interface with the Gameboy, and was even covered under most Australian insurance policies. Wessel’s new product sports a sleeker look and a more sophisticated design, with customizable settings permitting older users to adjust their HI/LO blood glucose target range and set daily alarms, as well as a child-friendly “basic” mode.

Far from the days of badgering young patients into paying even the most cursory attention to their readings, Bayer and Wessel count on kids being so engaged that they run the risk of over-testing. In fact, a maximum limit of readings per day is programmed into the game.

While the marketplace success of the Didget still remains to be seen, Jim Wessel and his new meter provide a great example of what’s possible from empowered caregivers, and offers a glimpse into the future of health devices that are mobile, social, and drive motivation.

Ash Damle, the founder of MEDgle, is a rare breed. He’s a code-slinging, patent-holding, MIT-grad but he’s no nerd. His natural social skills would put most sales people to shame. I first met him at the Health 2.0 Boston conference as I waited for the Hello Health demo session to begin. I was in the back of the room with a frustrated, cranky crowd–not enough chairs, the session was late, lunch was inedible, black-shirted Hello Health youth marched through the group and stepped on our feet…

Then suddenly a friendly guy strolls through the door smiling, looking everyone in the eye as he walked past and announces to nobody in particular, “Pretty crowded in here…I just got in from a red eye.” Within minutes our little group was chatting, actually laughing, and of course I soon got “Hi I’m Ash, who you with?”

MEDgle’s flagship site is MEDgle.com which is a personalized medical search engine. But unlike other search engines, MEDgle uses an expert system that connects 7000 symptoms to 2000 diagnoses and factors in personal information like age, gender, and lifestyles.

While MEDgle, and Ash, are well known in the Health 2.0 crowd I don’t think this company is getting the attention they deserve in the wider community. A strong, unique technology poised perfectly for the booming EHR/PHR space, or a strong addition to any of the large health publishers. I caught up with Ash shortly after the conference…

Krū Research: Who is MEDgle for and what does it do?

Ash Damle:  We really want to help people understand their medical options. MEDgle is for anybody who has a symptom or was told a diagnosis, who wants to understand what that actually means and potentially what the next steps are.

Krū: Is this built with your own in-house technology or is this built on top of another search platform?

Ash:  This is our home grown technology which provides a strong base for a different type of search.  We are now going to be marrying it with the semantic analysis stuff we also developed.

Krū:  I see I can chat with eNurse Kim. Is this a bot or a live chat application?

Ash:  This is a purely virtual nurse. It’s basically the MEDgle platform but in a conversational format. This is one way to get the power of MEDgle to more people, to make it more accessible.

Krū:  And you also have a site called HealthierMee.

Ash:  HealthierMee uses the same MEDgle engine but instead of looking for a particular symptom or diagnosis, it’s about taking you as the query and telling you what you are at risk for and what you can do about it.

Basically it takes your height, your weight, your age, your lifestyle…family history and comes back to what we call a fit score. We identify what things have exacerbated your risks and specifically what’s the biggest bank for your buck for improving your fit score.

Krū:  Is this something similar to the Real Age Quiz?

Ash:  Very much so but instead of a real long list of questions you kind of get your answers a bit faster.  [Laughs] Second of all, we took a much more scientific approach to the whole issue in terms of what’s going on with their health and as they continue with their current health trajectory, what does it look over the next five, ten, fifteen years.

Krū:  Tell me about the MEDgle widget.

Ash:  The widget enables people to put MEDgle on their own website and have people access it in sort of a quick pop-up window.  It’s one of our experiments, like the eNurse, to try to make it even easier to deploy the MEDgle platform.

Krū:  Now let’s talk about the business side of things. How are you funded?

Ash:  We are self funded. I think it’s important to build something initially with real value and it’s very important to find the right partner VC partner-it’s not so much the money per say but finding the right partner for the long term perspective.

Krū:  What’s your business model?

Ash:  We have a premium type model where we offer a base set of functionality that everyone can use and obviously for those who are interested we can offer additional services.  We license our API. It’s not yet publicly available but it’s being offered to select companies who are interested. We licensed it to the folks at Hello Health.

Krū:  Who would you consider your competition?

Ash:  There are a lot of people focused on general web health search, or people focused on creating thousands of articles. I don’t know anyone who has the approach we have in terms of focusing on how everything connects. And creating the algorithms and knowing the probabilities necessary to make those connections for an individual.

Krū:  The ability to connect to relevant data is the key.

Ash:  Exactly. What we really focus on is how everything connects. What are all the probabilities and algorithms needed to give relevant accurate answers? An EHR or PHR company can come to us to help transform their interfaces to make them much more assistive and intelligent for both the health care providers as well as their consumers.

Krū:  Your focus is more B2B than B2C but have you had much traffic to Medgle.com?

Ash:  We did about 200,000 people last month, 600,000 page views. We haven’t really done any for advertising or anything there but people seem to find what we had and like it.

Krū:  Are there opportunities for Medgle to partner with pharmaceutical companies?

Ash:  We are very excited about working with Pharma in a way that adds value to both the company as well as the consumer.

One way would be for Pharma to advertise on Medgle because the ads would only appear in places that makes sense–only within the context of this particular disease or this particular age group or a particular lifestyle. We understand all those pieces and therefore can help them do a better job with their targeted advertising. And our system also understands the issues around comorbidities. We get those connections and are enhancing our API to deal with this type of thing.

Krū: Ash, thanks for the time and keep us posted.

Ash: Thanks.

I just released our newest white paper, Patients Rising: How to Reach Empowered, Digital Health Consumers.

Download here: http://bit.ly/VDDvp