How health information has to be organized

Curated, Personalized and Actionable

Current situation

Generally we all tend to do a simple Google search to find more about a symptom or a health condition. More often we click on one the top 5 pages and start going through it in-order to find the information that we are looking for. After a couple of searches we tend to gather pieces of useful information and put it together in our mind and develop general understanding of the symptom or the health condition. Before we notice it we would have spent about half an hour or an hour building this general understanding but without anything conclusive.

More often we are also overwhelmed with the information that is presented and sometimes the information shown causes fear or panic. This was exactly the problem that I was facing when trying to search for common child symptoms while also looking for home treatment options.

How we believe health information has to organized

While there is a need for generalized information on health topics, as being done by Healthline, WebMD and several others, we strongly believe information has to be personalized, actionable, curated and trustworthy.

Personalized

When a parent searches for a symptom or a health condition, they should be provided information based on the child’s age group. For example, if a parent searches for cough in an infant, they should not be advised of honey as a home remedy as it is believed to cause infant botulism. All the information shown to them should be relevant to that of an infant and nothing else.

Actionable

Along with showing details of the symptom and what causes it, there should be a simple treatment guide. For example, if saline nasal drops are suggested for a child with a runny nose, parents have to be given guidance on the dosage and frequency of the medication as suggested by the manufacturer i.e. based on the child’s age and weight. All supporting information has to be provided so that the user reading it can take a decision and act on it rather than having to go to another place and find more information about it.

Curated

Currently there is an information overload on many health sites on the web, as the focus has been on how long the users spends on each page, than showing them just the relevant information. Showing curated information is very important, many parents hardly have the time to go through pages of symptom details and description. They generally end up visiting the doctor even for treating simple symptoms.

Trustworthy

With bloggers, digital media publishing information, it’s very difficult to find medically accurate information. Therefore we need information to verified by doctors and healthcare professionals thereby earning the trust of parents and other users.

Best quality

Best medical professionals should be encouraged to provide medical information i.e. home treatment guides for various symptoms and medical conditions and parents should be able to up vote or down vote on the usefulness of the information provided. This helps ensure that the best information always comes up first.

User feedback

Generally the feedback loop in healthcare is very slow compared to other areas of work like say programming. Certain tests or procedures or treatment guides tend to be used for years together before any changes happen. We believe there should be a constant interaction between healthcare professionals and their target customers so that they get to know what works and what doesn’t in near real time. This helps them update the information provided.

Summary

In our small attempt to solve the problem, we have built a simple app for parents. When they select the child's age and symptom there by get a FREE treatment guide that they could use at home. This guide, explains about the symptom, provides over the counter medications along with manufacturer recommended dosages. It also provides self care measures that parents can take to help avoid the recurrence of the symptom in the future. Parents are also advised when to see a doctor.

Below is a home treatment guide for a 5 year old with constipation that has been verified by a doctor. To obtain home treatment guides for other ages and symptoms, check out: https://CurieDoc.com