Social media amplifies everyones' voice. In many cases, it has broken the dominance of traditional media and croprate communicators by empowering "citizen journalists" to break stories and challenge the traditional headlines. Moms can connect with each other and get advice versus relying on the "experts" annointed by publishing houses and media companies.
But health is one of those areas where we may bemoan the tyranny of traditional medicine and the special interest influence of pharmaceutical and insurance providers, but I still can't diagnose a major illness never mind treat it. I rely on a doctor. (regretably as mine is such an old-school, "stop-your-whining"- kind of doctor).
iMedix just won the Crunchies for Best New Startup 2007. This is annointed them by the social media tech community from the Valley (I am guessing here as there were 0ver 122K votes cast to determine the winners) where the emphasis is on "tech" and venture capital. It is not a hotbed of medical innovation.
At it's heart, iMedix is a social network for people who want to talk with other people about common conditions and health interests. If I have thyroid cancer (I don't but do have a related thyroid thingee), I can type it into their super-simple interface and recieve simple web search results from prefered, brand name sources (are they "scraping?") and a number of people who have tagged themselves as interested in 'thyroid' or 'thyroid cancer.'
Now, I will admit that I am a bit curious about what the crowd makes of this weird phenomena of thyroid malfunction. I am suspicious of some environmental condition that will reveal itself someday (my wife, myself and our cat all suffer from a related condition). Still, why would I reach out to these people?
The iMedix social network has a lot of things going for it and most of those are in the simplicity of the interface, the function and the overall ease of use. It stands as a strong testament to the strengths of a Web 2.0 mindset. Still many services are trying a social network model for healthcare issues. Some, like Revolution Health mix community content and features with professional information from trusted brands like Cleaveland Clinic, Mayoclinic.com and others. There are even "doctor bloggers'. Inspire, formerly Clinicahealth, goes a different direction by offering a social network platform to those that share a condition and want to connect with each other. It might be the Preemie social network or the Diet and Fitness community at Discovery Health.
iMedix is a broader social network driven by a front-end search interface that drives you to people who have tagged a common interest. We don't know much about each other. The service is new and most profiles are half-baked or not baked at all. Mine included. I am just not sure how much of my health interests I want to put on my profile beyond the one I have shared in this post.
Problems with iMedix:
- The management team is all tech VC and start-up folks. Not a single health professional or pyschologist.
- No clear way to assign credibility to different members. I could easily get a bunch of hooey from folks with no repercussions to the service or that member.
- The homepage is a big stock photo. Don't these startups know that stock photography telegraphs - "don't trust us, we are creating an image here."
- The dominant member (or does he work there?), Sean, appears to be represented by a wonderfully attractive...stock photo! Remember the Macwarehouse catalogs in the nineties that featured thumbnails of their customer service people that were laughably stock images? - "Hi! I'm Gretchen. Call me." Well, it's not funny when I am suffering from a condition and you want me to trust you.
- There is no critical mass of members. Right now, the service seems stocked with test accounts and staff members.
I like the technical and user experience. But that's not a good enough reason to give it the best startup award (the awards were user-voted). We'll see if they get past the weaknesses mentioned above to unlock a truly powerful health social network. To do, they will have to probably partner with some of the more trusted information providers. It's not likely enough to aggregate their search results.
Will they change? Or does iMedix just want to flip the company? Or worse, are they struck by tech hubris that won't let them see through to these weaknesses enough to fix them?
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