Medical student + dev = new start-up, feedback? / Stay up-to-date on your health | Hacker News Reader

Medical student + dev = new start-up, feedback? / Stay up-to-date on your health

meddik.com

24 pointstasooey25 comments

Ok, how is it different to mailing list with nice looking subscription page?

Looking at your (minimalistic) page, I can't see a reason why should I give you my email and click "sign up". Some more info about service, guest preview of what is offered might make me interesting, but one page with one image and subscribe button will not.

That's fair. Then again, that's how Summify started out, too. Once we get the consumer-facing site built, feel free to sign-up then. This list is just for people who want to be notified once we're live.

Sorry, realized I never answered your question.

The difference: We scrape medical forums, blogs, twitter, facebook, etc (all the social media avenues) and add a layer of intelligent semantic analysis to bring you the best information relevant to what you have (or just the hottest news if you don't have anything).

If there isn't anything new that meets our threshold, we won't send you anything.

Scraping sites for this content has vary basic copyright issues. How do you get around that?

From our research about these laws, as long as we cite back to the original site (i.e. we're not displaying their information on our own sites, only linking to them) and respect the no-scrape robots.txt files, we're in the clear.

Think this is a fantastic idea and very useful to a lot of people. I used to work with the hemophiliac community and this (like many other communities) is exactly what they need. I'll also be looking forward to using it for myself. Signed up, best of luck!

Thanks for the encouragement! There's just too much information out there; we just want to distill it.

Good idea. I've been part of a development team working on a similar space. Instead of medical conditions and topics, it was research progress in specific areas - feeds on most recent articles, cutting edge results, methods and procedures that have seen results. I think we are going to be seeing a lot more this in the near future.

Thanks! This idea came out of the fact that we built an enterprise Radian6-like platform specifically for the health vertical and realized this would be a useful tool for consumers as well.

That and people send so much time searching for this stuff anyways, we might as well help them out.

You really need a privacy policy linked from the front page. I hope it goes without saying that if someone wants to follow news about medical_condition_x, people are going to be sensitive about who has access to the data linking their email (and, by proxy, identity) to that condition.

Working with our lawyers on this as fast as we can.

This would be a great way for me to keep up with the latest info related to Type 1 diabetes (which I have).

Signed up.

Thanks! That's the idea. There are so many new apps and treatments coming out it's hard to keep up with them all individually.

Great. I see this being very useful if you have a specific medical condition. Your favicon is missing.

Actually, if you don't have a specific medical condition but just wanted to stay up-to-date with something in health (new startups, health technology, health policy, etc), It serves the same function.

Thanks for alerting us about the favicon!

Another minor issue... why is there an asterix next to "Email," but no accompanying disclaimer or privacy policy?

Your main headline in 3 lines (rather) than 2 on OSX (Lion) in Firefox 10. Look is like the div width issue. Everything else looks good. Keep up the good work. :)

Thanks! +1 for the HackerNews community :)

When are you hoping to launch?

Have you begun building this, or are you just gauging interest?

We've built this for enterprise; it's just a matter of adding a consumer facing aspect to it. And yes, we're gauging interest to see if it is even worth it to have a consumer web aspect.

Hoping to launch at the end of Techstar's Affiliate startup accelerator Blueprint Health (mid-March). Thanks!

My grandmother recently asked if I could research Barret's Esophagus, which she suffers from. She wanted to know if there'd been any new / experimental procedures that didn't exist 5 years ago. If Meddick would help with that, I'd sign up (and my grandmother would probably pay monthly for it)

Meddik would help with that. Especially with rarer disorders like Barrett's esophagus (or less diagnoses, rather), you'll hear about new treatments as soon as our engine surfaces them. Thanks for the support!

As someone working in the same space, I am going to give you honest feedback that might seem harsh.

1. There are other sites doing this better and they have far more than just a landing page.

2. Are you holding user data? If so what about hippa compliance?

3. Your differentiating factor: "We scrape medical forums, blogs, twitter, facebook, etc (all the social media avenues) and add a layer of intelligent semantic analysis to bring you the best information relevant to what you have (or just the hottest news if you don't have anything)."

Simply put, I dont believe that you have one single bit of this.

4. Why would I use this and not patients like me or crohnology.com where I can find out about new things and also have them vetted by my friends that have similar conditions.

5. I dont think your newsletter could ever be better than condition specific newsletters like the ones from the CCFA or ADA? How will you deal with that?

Thanks for the honest feedback!

1. Who else is in this space of content organization? Plus, in the spirit of start-ups, it's never about how many competitors you have; it's about who can ultimately provide the most value :)

2. Holding user data, but we're deidentified enough to be HIPAA-compliant (or at least our lawyers say so.)

3. Haha, you don't have to believe us. You'll see it in action when it's live.

4. We know both of those teams and they're both fantastic! Our goal isn't to replace them, just increase their awareness. Patientslikeme works fantastically for chronic diseases; Crohnology is a great start-up for Crohn's disease. But the percentage of Crohn's users who actually know about Crohnology and product updates is low. Our goal is to get the newest and best information to those who need it most.

5. Perhaps not, but there are a couple distinguishing factors here. First, the more common chronic diseases have resources like that, but many of the ones in between have little support. Second, the topics we cover are a bit different. They're focused on generating their own content and might miss out on some of the thousands of new apps being generated in this health boom. Ultimately, we'd love to provide more awareness to newsletters like that if they're really the most helpful tool.

Patients first.

I am a patient. Being a patient is why I am so passionate about products in this space. So the thought of someone scraping the web to find information that I might apply to managing my medical condition is scary. I have worked at CPA companies that ran things like Molocure scams, Cure diabetes now sites etc... Perhaps your technology is so advanced that it can tell the difference between valid news and scams and perhaps you will manually review everything and verify the source of the information; but im not willing to bet my health on it.

I feel ya. Having worked in healthcare for years and as a medical student myself / recently gone through rounds, I know exactly where you're coming from. In addition, I am a patient myself in the hospital once a week.

Moreover, having grown up in this era of cyberchondria, I know that the danger of self-treatment is ever present and real, but that's not the problem we're set out to solve.

Physicians know quite a bit, yes. They can tell you what medicines to take, anecdotally what they've seen, and what the latest research tells them. However, they're far removed from what the patient actually goes through in terms of daily struggles, and what is out there to help them with that.

We built our technology with the mindset to surface useful information and bury scams. We actually built a medical search engine that did just that, but it didn't take.

We interpret "apply to managing my medical condition" as directing you to the right resources (e.g. Crohnology for Crohns, WeSprout for parents) that you might not have otherwise heard of. And we definitely have safeguards against spam.

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