HealthMap: a one-stop shop for health online
An internal product memo from MetaMed’s early days, sketching the patient-facing “HealthMap” web product. The team had been discussing the feature in scattered places; this is Alyssa’s attempt at a unified vision document, also posted to the company wiki for comment.
We’ve been talking about the HealthMap a lot, and about some of the things we want it to do, but I still don’t think we have a good, concise summary of what it’s about and what the main components will be. Here’s what I’m currently envisioning.
The eventual goal, as I understand it, should be one-stop shopping for health online. If you’re worried about a family disease, or want more information on your condition, or want tips to become healthier — everything health-related that isn’t an emergency — your first stop should be the HealthMap. This is really ambitious, and we won’t get there right away, but if we can build it I think we’ll have an immensely valuable product. Based on the goals we’ve outlined on the wiki, here are the main sub-components — roughly, the big tabs someone will see when they first log in: Talk to your Doctor.
Two-way communication with the patient’s doctor. Text, phone and video all seem fairly easy to do; doctors can also have an option to send a mass message to all their patients, or all their patients with a certain age, certain medical history, etc. This category also includes booking an appointment, talking with the nurse, and so on.
Get Informed.
Your personal medical history that we’ve uploaded, plus relevant research reports our team has compiled. E.g., if you have high blood pressure, that should be listed there as a possible concern, and if we’ve written a report on it there’ll be a link to download it. We should also list things you might be at risk for based on your medical history — older people will be at risk of heart attacks, etc. This is also where the genetic-test results live.
Do the Research.
Intended as a replacement for WebMD and similar sites, which have become really popular and to which many people first turn when they have a health issue. For the most part, I think UpToDate is just better than most of the “online health” sites, so one option is to make this section essentially a front-end for UpToDate. The main disadvantage is that UTD is somewhat more technical than most online health sites, so it may be hard to understand.
Investigate an Issue.
If you have a question, here’s where you can hire us as researchers to investigate. Probably the most straightforward of the tabs: you describe the problem or the issue, and we get a team to work on it and send you the results.
Become Healthier.
The actionable recommendations we develop for you, based on both your personal medical history and our research generally. For example, if you’re a smoker, here’s where we can list the most effective ways we’ve found to quit. If you’re deficient in a certain nutrient, we can suggest supplements or foods that have it; if you don’t sleep enough, ways to sleep more and better; etc.
Input Information.
As many have noted, we can’t rely on patients to input all the information we’d like. But I think most patients will want to input some information, and that could be a really powerful tool for us. Tracking your weight? Put the scale readings in here. Exercising? Keep tabs on your progress here. Have a backache? Input the symptoms in the Symptom box. We’ll keep track of it all, analyze it, run statistics on it, give you recommendations, and let you know if anything seems amiss.
healthehuman.com has a pretty good summary of different information categories.
For the main screen, we might want to do it Facebook-style: have these all as “tabs,” with a “main feed” for recent updates — new recommendations, new messages from the doctor, new genetic-test results, etc.