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Comment by d3x | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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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