In July 1999, Jason and Charlotte Maude started Isabel Healthcare after their then 3 year old daughter Isabel was nearly fatally misdiagnosed during a hospital stay. They involved clinical experts to lead the research and development of a pediatric diagnostic decision support system, and in June 2002 Isabel diagnostic tool was launched. The tool that helped clinicians generate differential...
Neurologic examinations are unique in medicine. Unlike other fields of medicine in which one can touch (surgery, orthopedics) or see the disease (eg, dermatology, ophthalmology), neurologic conditions often manifest in cryptic ways. Which is why simple clinical examination done with basic tools (reflex hammer, tuning fork, pin...) are always relevant for initial evaluation. Touch Diagnostics is...
VisualDx is healthcare's answer to the visual search trend led by companies like search-cube.com, like.com etc. VisualDx helps identify dental and medical diseases by letting providers search for diagnosis based on how a disease looks and presents itself. Rochester, NY based Logical Images is the company behind VisualDx. Understandably enough, it was founded by two dermatologists from University...
Palpitations, dizziness, and fainting can often be symptoms of underlying heart disease. The key to the correctly diagnosing them is reliable documentation of the underlying cardiac rhythm when symptoms occur. Holter and Event recorders are the two noninvasive methods have been usually used to do such long-term ambulatory monitoring, but they often end up being insufficient or ineffective for...
iTriage is a mobile app that helps users understand, prioritize their acute health-related symptoms and seek appropriate and close-by care. Its service is also available on the web at iTriageHealth. At the core is a symptom-checker that lets users do a high-level categorization of what could be wrong with them, and how serious/not can it be. That functionality is nothing special, since there are...
Around 1989, Steven Schueler started working on a computer program that could perform symptom triage. The intent was to create something that patients could use to safely decide what to do when they were sick. In 1990, his company DSHI Systems released “Home Medical Advisor” on a floppy disk. Later it was issued on CD-ROM’s, and claims to have sold over 2 million copies over the years. A major...
Usually I'm wary of putting time into big-budget health portals, but San Francisco based Healthline deserves a mention. They have a portfolio of healthcare search, navigation and content that is syndicated through a growing network of big web properties like AARP, Health.com, iVillage, AOL etc. Healthline was founded in 1999 as YourDoctor.com and was re-launched as Healthline Networks in 2005....
SimulConsult is a diagnostic decision support system started by Dr.Michael Segal. It covers 1,800 diseases that have at least one neurological finding in them. SimulConsult has an interesting logic behind it. Roughly speaking, its knowledge is derived from a 'computational wiki' that is restricted to physician users only. So its database is not only open for viewing, but users can submit...
With a play on google's name, MEDgle offers symptom based health information search. The idea is to 'empower patients in their discussions with physicians', by making relevant content easy to find. The navigation is pretty simple and straightforward. MEDgle's output is a probabilistic list of disease/conditions based on the user input. The content is authored by their 3-physician team and is...