We're closely watching the well-crafted TauMed, and interviewed CEO Tauseef Bashir.THEIR DESCRIPTION: TauMed is a virtual health community for people to ask, share, interactively navigate and search the most relevant personalized consumer health information available on the web. Instead of shuffling through countless web pages of irrelevant information, we have created a user-experience whereby consumers can connect quickly with the most relevant health information.
1. You've tackled Community, and Search-- why both, as a small firm? Do you see the two as inextricably linked?
Answer: Yes, we strongly believe that when it comes to health, it is very important to link Community with Search to ensure that users have access to the best and most unbiased information. TauMed achieves this by combining an interactive online health community with a powerful, contextual search engine in order to assure a unique and satisfying user-experience. In other words, search constitutes the backbone of TauMed, around which all other components are built in a contextually integrated fashion.
2. You talk about "Premium" content, which Online Health needs given the sea of data the web has exposed, of varying authority levels. How important is this, and how do you produce this content?
Answer: We ensure the quality of information by indexing the most credible consumer health information available on the Web. We also license expert-generated health content and in addition provide users with all of the social networking tools necessary to ensure content quality. The external sites indexed in the TauMed search engine are screened for clinical significance, relevance to the general public, and timeliness. All TauMed licensed content is URAC-accredited and TauMed is HON-certified.
The user generated content is not screened or monitored by TauMed staff. We firmly believe in the democracy of the web. The TauMed user community members can help assure high standards and relevancy of topics by voting for the best responses, rating health videos, and flagging any inappropriate or offensive user-generated content. Although ranking, rating, and flagging are entirely optional, we strongly encourage users to take advantage of these features and appreciate any input from our user community.
3. We often talk about "Mean Time to Meaningful Information," and many Netizens complain that it takes too long to find what they want in Online Health. Where does speed figure into your model?
Answer: By using multiple relevancy algorithms, data mining and data cleansing tools, and semantics, we ensure speed of connecting the users to the most relevant and personalized information. Regardless of what users are viewing on www.taumed.com at any given time, they are always dynamically connected to the most relevant and personalized related information from all of the sources from the Web, Video, and User Generated Content. Additionally, we offer smart tags, medical terms tags, and drug terms tags, which users can click on to connect to the most meaningful information instantly. For example, if users are viewing a video about "Trans Fats", they are automatically presented with related information from all of the other sources like Videos, Community, Web, and the News.
4. It seems that mobile is exploding everywhere but Online Health (with a few exceptions like NoMoreClipboard)-- do you have plans in this area?
Answer: Yes, actually TauMed infrastructure is already fully mobile-enabled. The majority of TauMed's main features are accessible via any mobile device. People accessing the site via mobile devices can ask health questions, search for, save and share health information, find doctors, and read the latest health news or warnings. TauMed Mobile's advanced features
facilitate dynamic community interaction by intelligently connecting the members to relevant community categories based on their questions and interests. These features have been designed to circumvent traditional mobile limitations, maximize the system's usability, and assure customer satisfaction. We have a very comprehensive roadmap to offer users the best
health tools available using any mobile device.
5. We see many new brave Davids in a space filled with Goliaths like WebMD et al. How will you prosecute the war as a small company among the giants?
Answer: We have a very comprehensive and revolutionary product roadmap. We are very quick to implement constructive feedback from our users and are always close to our consumers' needs. We are a team of highly skilled individuals with no bureaucracy. This lack of bureaucracy provides us the ability to execute quickly and efficiently. Our ultimate goal is to offer consumers with the best health tools and the most relevant health information.
We cover the key Online Health/PHR/EMR companies in our wiki; the entire list is here. Should we be covering your company? Email us at mattc [@] marketintellnow.com.
MarketIntellNow® eStore
NOTE: We're marketintellnow on all the IM services, including Skype and Twitter.
