PharmaSurveyor is a free service that analyzes your medications to point out potential drug interaction and side-effect risks. It was founded in 2006 by Linda and Erick Von Schweber to commercialize the ‘knowledge surveying’ technology they have developed over the last 25 years or so.
Given the fact that Adverse Drug Effects (ADE) are one of the leading cause of death in the US, there is significant market opportunity in consumer education and support around it. Couple of nifty features that I like:
- Direct meds import from Healthvault
- Community Knowledge Base – an aggregation of information and experiences from people who are on multiple drugs. This feature is currently in private beta, but I think that it can be a great revenue opportunity once it gets some traction in terms of number of users. There are plenty of pharma companies who would pay good money for getting early (even though informal) insight into side-effects, efficacy, interactions, and usage patterns of their drugs.
Seems like they are planning to integrate with DestinationRx and Polka, which is a good idea since the traffic from those sites will already be primed for the services that PharmaSurveyor provides. The advisory board has some significant names, including Barney Pell, Matthew Holt and Mark Musen.
They do have some interesting marketing techniques like analyzing celebrity cocktails, not requiring registrations, etc. Business model seems to be only google ads for now, which is no surprise given their research-oriented background. The site is more a proof-of-concept for the underlying technology (although I’m not sure what it is exactly). It’ll make a lot of sense to integrate this service with commercial CIS offerings, and take it one step beyond just using RxNorm.
Aug’10 Update: PharmaSurveyor service changed its name to SurveyorHealth. Now they also offer mobile apps for iPhone and iPad.