Have you ever had one of those weeks where the stories you read or heard about seemed to follow a pattern? The insights gained from one story feed another and another. This week’s theme has been making information for healthcare professionals, like nurses and physicians, and patients less static and more engaging. I wrote about physicians earlier this week so this one is for patients and it’s called Medivizor.
The New York-based company has developed a personalized content system for people who have been diagnosed with diabetes, colorectal cancer, prostate cancer and breast cancer, or who are caregivers for someone with one of these diseases. It plans to add Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and melaoma next. Users are sent information in a multimedia format tailored to their condition. The goal is to make the information more manageable to allow patients and caregivers to access content that adds value at their own pace.
As anyone looking for information about even the most minor medical condition can attest, there’s a ginormous amount of healthcare content on the Web from medical journals to newspapers and magazines, videos to podcasts. There are also patient portals, LinkedIn groups, clinical trial websites and Facebook pages and much, much more.
The content is geared to a Flesch-Kincaid reading level of 10 to 12 — a high school reading level — so it’s not overly simplistic, but it doesn’t assume you’ve been studying pre-med. Articles and video list the amount of time it will take to read them at this level. Folders organize the content depending on its type. One folder collects clinical trial notices, which are only sent to patients who match the criteria for a particular trial. Anther folder contains summaries and links of relevant patient communities.
At the registration process, users are asked seven to 10 questions about their health: What stage of the disease are you in? Are you pregnant? Breastfeeding? Or are you menopausal? What treatment are you on? What medications are you taking? Do you have any underlying conditions? The layout and text is is minimalist, direct, almost antiseptic. When users click on buttons such as when they “like” an article, a flash of green appears the color of a traffic light.
The executive team is a mix of serial entrepreneurs, medtech veterans and technology management. Oren Fuerst, the executive chairman, is a serial entrepreneur and investor in medtech and serves as managing director of Strategic Models. CEO Tal Givoly previously worked at Amdocs where he was the chief scientist. Dr. Steven Kaplan, its chief medical officer, is a professor of urology and is chief of the Institute of Bladder and Prostate Health at Weill Cornell Medical College and director of the Iris Cantor Men’s Health Center at New York Presbyterian Hospital. Ronen Keinan, the chief operating officer, previously served as a vice president of portfolio management at Nokia Siemens Networks.
Fuerst said the way the system works is analogous to LinkedIn, where users get notified by email when they have an update and they go online to read it. If the users’ conditions change, they have to update their profiles so they keep getting relevant information.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Whenever something is published from a recognized source like a medical journal it gets sent to the Medivizor site. The team then decides which content is most relevant to which subscribers. “There may be 5,000 research papers per year on prostate cancer, but only 10 are changing the way we look at it,” Keinan says.
The company initially launched the service last year and it’s still in invitation-only mode. It’s fuzzy on details about how it will be monetized and whether the service will be offered by health systems, physicians or through payers. But right now it is free to subscribers and using their professional networks the company is finding a receptive audience. It seems clear that it wants to make people and their caregivers feel like they can better understand their conditions, feel less intimidated in conversations with their healthcare professionals. They can use the information to have a more informed dialogue with their physicians and be better positioned to make informed choices about their care.
