Health Social Networks
As many who know me, I have been building connections in social networks both “off line” and online for 40+ years. The old networks are from my childhood friends who I continue to be in contact usually on a daily basis (via e-mail) and in person a few times a year. I have developed at least 20 different and distinct networks ranging from friends, family, grade school, high school, college, graduate school, internships, professional associations, employers, etc. Facebook, Linked In…
I have always enjoy connecting with people across the street or around the global since a very early age. It is a passion of mine. So I stay connected on a daily basis with many people mostly about common interests, hobbies, technology, online solutions, healthcare, medicine, social networking and charities. What I have noticed in the past 3-4 years is not only the proliferation of general and topic specific social networking sites (listed below) that have “members” into the multi-millions, but “niche” health, medical and wellness social networking sites that may only have a few hundred or thousands of members. Media reports on this growing trend with zest in Business Week “Health Social Networking“, Mashable and other publications. Both models seem to work for their respective audiences one is focused on the “masses” to create huge media sites much like a major network television station, and the latter to serve very specific disease, health or medical issues someone would like to talk to others who have similar experiences. Perhaps the old adage “Birds of a feather, flock together” has deep roots into our global human condition to reach out and discover/communicate with others regardless of where they live and to share a common interest.
Back in late 1990s, I was an alpha investor and founder of eHealth, which became HealthOnline.com a venture capital backed company providing many of the “innovations” and “tools” incorporated in the emerging healthcare social networking sites below including: online health communities; disease specific message boards; professional and clinical support; health experts; and instant messaging. It is a bit gratifying to see such tools as common place on most of these sites now. The technology has advance tremendously and that benefits the users, patients, providers or others with the need to interact about specific health, medical or wellness issues.
Some of the emerging “health” networking site include:
Trusera Founded by Keith Schorsch a former Amazon.com executive is based in Seattle. “Trusera is a new social-networking website centered on health, The site, which features online communities and personalized health information, allows members to endorse one another’s contributions, as a way to identify reliable sources of information.”
Keas. Founded by Adam Bosworth, formerly VP of Google Health is launching this new site with a goal to “Dedicated to helping people stay as healthy as possible”. They are building a world class Advisory Board including Salesforce.com founder/CEO Marc Benioff, Esther Dyson of EDventure, former FDA Commissioner, David Kessler, MD and bringing together many talented professionals, one to watch.
Sermo Founder & CEO Daniel Palestrant, MD presented at the Healthcare 2.0 conference last September 2007 in San Francisco. Phyisicans social networking to discussion about diseases. “We are a practicing community of 65,000 physicians who exchange clinical insights, observations, and review cases in real time — all the time.” according to their site.
Medical Mingle. “Is the professional social networking site for people working in, servicing and studying for a career in the healthcare and medical fields.” It is like “Facebook meets/mashes with AMA”.
Daily Stength. Considered a “pioneer” in healthcare social networking. by founders Doug, Josh and Lars. The site has over 600 “communities”, with members, chat, blogs, 24/7/365 support groups, 300 treatment issues discussed, and medical news.
Wellsphere. Capitalizing on the growing personal and corporate focus on creating health life styles at home and at work, Ron Gutman and Dave Kashen founded the company help people improve their well being. “Wellsphere builds online healthy living communities that help people ‘Get active, Eat better and Unwind’.
HealthWorldWeb.com. Founded by CEO Daniel Kogan and Dr. Asya Kogan in 2006, “Health World Web is a Social Network Of Patient Communities, offering Help, Emotional Support, Non-Medical Advice…Health World Web is a social networking tool that allows you to take charge of your health. At Health World Web you can blog, chat and post to forums about your healthcare needs.”
WebTribes. Founded by Ryan and Kristin FitzGerald in 2006. “Currently they have 25,000 members across the 5 tribes. WebTribes focuses on life consuming ailments where studies show that isolation can be a detriment to a person’s health, while journaling and sharing experience with others can have very positive effects.”
RealMentalHealth.com This mission “Find and Meet people that are dealing with similar conditions by joining the first Mental Health Social Networking Community”. They list Groups, chats, forums, journals, etc. Interesting approach. My wife Dr. Hagit Glickman founded MyPysch.com which served the mental health professional community in a smiliar way back in 1997 and was a cover story feature in Inc magazine.
The study of social networking has been advanced by many including Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Director of Complex Network Research at University of Notre Dame. He wrote “Linked” which is a book full on excellent research and insights into the networking topic. Unless you have been in a deep coma the past five years you must have come across some of the leading “social networking” web site promoted by radio, television and online media socurces that initially were driven by teenage and college students, but has witness an increasing mainstream accpetance and use. Here are a few familiar ones.
MySpace.com: 191 million members. This site is massive, boasting the largest membership of any social networking site on the Internet.
Facebook.com: Was initially intended for college students — it branched out, and now allows everyone membership. 70 million members. http://blog.patientslikeme.com/
Linkedin.com: 20 million members — a powerful tool for business networking.
Friendster.com: 29 million members. Friendster was considered the top online social networking service until around April 2004, when it was overtaken by MySpace. Demographic studies indicate users are from 17 to 30 years old.
Stumbleupon.com: Boasting 2.75 million users, StumbleUpon is a web browser plugin that allows its users to discover and rate webpages, photos, videos, and news articles. A great way to get website promotion. Bought by eBay for $75 million in May 2007.
Orkut.com: Orkut is an Internet social networking service run by Google and named after its creator, Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten. It claims to be designed to help users meet new friends and maintain existing relationships. Now has a membership of 57 million.
Twitter.com: A free social networking service that allows users to send “updates” (text-based posts that are up to 140 characters long) via SMS, instant messaging, email, the Twitter website, or an application such as Twitterrific.
Classmates.com: 40 million members. One of the oldest social networking sites around, Classmates was kicked off in 1995, and has proven to be a great way for members to to connect with old friends and acquaintances from throughout their lives.
Meetup.com: 2 million members. Meetup.com is an online social networking portal that facilitates offline group meetings in various localities around the world. Meetup allows members to find and join groups unified by a common interest, such as politics, books, games, movies, health, pets, careers or hobbies.
Yahoo! 360° (a.k.a Yahoo! Days) is a personal communication portal similar to orkut and MySpace — it is currently in the beta-testing phase. It integrates features of social networking, blogging and photo sharing sites.
Xanga.com: 40 million members. Xanga is a free Web-based service that hosts weblogs, photoblogs, videoblogs, audioblogs, and social networking profiles.
Care2.com: 7.2 million members. Care2 is a social networking website that was founded to help connect activists from around the world.
Ryze.com: .25 million members. Ryze.com is a free social networking website designed to link business professionals.
Recently, several major internet players including MicroSoft (www.healthvault.com now in Beta), Google (www.google.com/health in beta too)
Take Care,
Michael
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Comments
health care social network is a good idea!sociol workers should all keep abreast with all the new methods and findings out there for the sake of humanity!
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jane doe
There are now thousands of social networks that cater to a whole variety of subjects. These smaller, focused sites allow users to connect with like-minded people and give advertisers targeted demographics. Niche social networks are also good for marketers who have a product or service they want to promote that relates to a particular interest. A good place to find such sites is this search engine for social networking sites.
A new physician-only social networking site is Ozmosis - http://www.ozmosis.com - and it’s gaining popularity among physicians who seek a trusted environment in which to improve their practices.
The integration of social networking and health networking is poised to be a strong contender in the overall health care plan patients adopt for themselves. With the foundations you have laid with sites like eHealth, you are clearly in the position to appreciate the growth that has occurred and the growth that is on the brink of happening.
I think there is a lot of room left for innovation in the Health Social Networking space such as the Smart Search Engine, for example. As I wrote in my blog on THCB ( http://www.thehealthcareblog.com/the_health_care_blog/2008/05/wishing-for-a-s.html ) , we all long for the search engine that will learn our habits and our health needs. One that will age with us and help us with our health issues when we really need it.
Another big demand, in my opinion, is for the intelligent recommendation engine that can guide us to establish useful social connections with others and provide us with relevant content such as news, blogs and forums based on who we are. I guess the keyword here is intelligence. We need to teach our services and websites to deliver what’s important to users as opposed to what brings the most ad revenue.
I honestly believe that the world of health social networking will benefit patients much more and will provide a greater service to people than the already established and proven collective social interactions about wine, cars, cameras and restaurants. Choosing the right doctor, best insurance plan, and right medication is beyond the opinion of one random doctor, wordy neighbor or magazine ad. Social networks create this flood of data and the successful technology can just tap into this sea of words to deliver the most useful results for the seeking consumer.
Thank you for including HealthWorldWeb (www.healthworldweb.com) in this list. We are planning big things in the months and years to come.
another good one is http://www.webtribes.com - been a member of depressiontribe.com for a couple years and find it helpful.