Today we’re excited to launch a new version of Iodine.
The new features and architecture are based on what we’ve learned in the six months since we launched in beta. In that time, we’ve watched how our growing community of users engage with Iodine: what they like, what they don’t, which features they find useful, and which features they haven’t found at all.
And we’ve watched how they contribute to Iodine, sharing their reviews and tips with what works — and what doesn’t — for their health. We’ve learned that as much as people want access to information, they’re also eager to connect with experience, with people who’ve been there before.
The result is a new product, one that builds on our growing volume of user-generated data and ample clinical data with the goal of giving people new ways to engage with our data and with each other. We’ve always believed that Iodine is a living breathing thing, nothing like the static experience of other online consumer health products. This new site — which we’ve been calling “Plum” internally (it’s purple like Iodine!) — makes that vitality part of the user experience at every turn.
Plum is built around conditions, not medications. Most people don’t think about their health with a specific treatment or therapy already in mind. They start with a problem, a disease or a health situation they want to understand or resolve or improve. Starting with conditions allows us to help our users when they’re first seeking it.
We also wanted to make Iodine even better at helping people understand their options and make decisions. So we took a cue from companies like TripAdvisor and Yelp and Amazon, products that help people make better choices every day. We’ve built things like personalization filters and head-to-head comparisons, and we’ve made first-person reports and reviews from real people more prominent. These consumer-centric features are standard issue all over the digital world, but they’ve never really existed in health or medicine. Until now.
We’ve simplified our design to make it easier and faster to find the information you’re looking for. And we sped up our page load speed and other factors, to make for a faster experience.
Some particulars about the new Iodine:
It’s personal Different people have different needs. Users can now personalize their experience at Iodine, adding filters to surface information they’re especially interested in — medications safe to drink alcohol with, say — or remove data that isn’t relevant to them — pregnancy related information, for instance. We’ve also introduced accounts, so you can keep your preferences and so we can help you keep track of (and up to date with) your medications.
It’s about community More than 100,000 people have shared their medication experience with Iodine. This is just the start, because the more we can build out a knowledge base out of everyday life — what works and what doesn’t — and the more we can develop insights based on this knowledge, the more we can impact medicine and medical care and people’s daily lives.
It’s about answers It’s never been easier to know your options for treatment. Cool tools let you compare one medication with its alternatives, and make clear what has worked best for different demographic groups. We’ve also got terrific information on What to Expect with medication, making the previously opaque process of starting a drug much clearer and happier.
It’s trustworthy Where did we get the data for those What to Expect tools? We tapped a superb team of pharmacists and MDs to turn their best practices into something anybody can understand. We’ve also making more use of data from the FDA, that helps make side effects more clear.
Ultimately, what we’re building at Iodine is a new way for people to learn from others’ experience and to share their own experience. We believe this is a profound and valuable part of making medicine better — helping people navigate their options, understand what they’re in for, and building insights out of that shared experience. We’re thrilled to put this out today — and we’re eager to hear what you think. Drop us a line at team@iodine.com.
