The collaborative Symptometer

OK, to follow up on my interests for this year, I have started a dive into IT meets Bio/Pharma/Healthcare.

This one is a little off the path I was thinking about, but I am in the bumping into trees part (the fun part). Healthcare Collaboration Networks: Collaborative Symptometer. Gencache has developed a collaborative symptom meter. It is in alpha. Here is how it works:

1. register for site. (gawd I wish more people would implement Passport or some sort of single credentials system).
2. start using the site. It is pretty confusing, but basically you go into your profile and start creating “health profiles” with symptoms and things that worked for you. I entered one for “lower back pain” and put cure as “core exercises with abs and back weights”. That always works for me. Lower back pain is a sign I am not doing enough crunches.
3. There are 131 Genecacher’s signed up and it looks like not alot of activity. They try to get you to enter more profiles, link yours to other people, search for other people with similar symptoms, and invite your friends.
4. They have the typical chicken and the egg problem. I guess the idea is that if enough symptom/solution pairs were up there you could simply enter your symptoms and get a list of highly qualifed solutions. But who is going to take the time to load all that? And there is no easy way to enter a symptom and get a solution that I can yet find. (maybe v 2.0). If they could find an easy way to seed the network… Unfortunately there is no easy “upload” like there is for my contacts to Plaxo or something.

Well it is after all an Alpha.

What I like: Use community experiences in healthcare to provide better health care.

What I don’t like: No scale yet. Hard to police a large community for snake oil salesmen.