We're rolling out our slate of eHealth Innovators. iMedix is the 9th of 10; see the unfolding list to the right.
iMedix is a Tel Aviv-based company behind a free website that helps you find and share health information.. They're our #9 of ten eHealth Innovators of 2008. Here's our interview with their CMO & co-founder Iri Amirav.
1. iMedix was founded in January 2007-- can you discuss your history-to-date, and how you are funded?
Sure, we’d love to. iMedix was created as a result of our own personal health concerns. Both Amir Leitersdorf (CEO and co-founder) and myself (Iri Amirav, CMO and co-founder) were having difficulties locating relevant and useful health information online in a timely manner. We often had to dig deep into search results to find what we were looking for. Additionally, we couldn’t find a place on the Web that could provide us with health answers from patients in real-time. It was out of these frustrations and needs that iMedix was born. We saw a need to provide consumers with a community-powered health search engine that could provide people with the relevant health information and connect them with like-minded individuals who shared similar experiences. From there, we were able to obtain funds from our investors to launch the site and make it available to the public.
2. What are the discrete components of the iMedix product?
The iMedix product is a free site that provides an innovative approach to finding and sharing health information. iMedix combines a patent-pending search technology with a unique communications platform for patients, allowing them to interact and discuss their health concerns in real-time. iMedix provides millions of health articles, pictures and videos that have been filtered and ranked by the iMedix community. Since consumers researching health conditions are drawn to others looking for similar information and facing similar circumstances, iMedix has introduced a new platform for people to share health information, experiences and suggestions with other like-minded individuals. The iMedix system is able to locate and match patients that can exchange valuable health data. The system also prioritizes and suggests the patients an individual should contact first, based on how active and useful these patients have been to others in the past. As soon as a person is matched with relevant patients from around the world, he or she is able to start an instant chat or send them a private message and ask for help, advice or any information they can share on the topic. As people find other patients that are helpful, or share the same interests, they also have the ability to create a friends list, for quick access to those individuals when information is needed. In this way, thousands of dynamic and helpful communities have been created around symptoms, conditions and treatments. This empowering online ‘patient-to-patient’ service is an industry first and gives consumers the ability to access health information and connect with others, so they can start making more informed health-related decisions.
3. What problem does the iMedix solution solve? And how will you generate revenue?
The iMedix solution seeks to solve the daunting task consumers face when searching the Internet for health information alone. Consumers are faced with massive amounts of irrelevant information. In addition, it is difficult to locate other people with similar problems and exchange valuable information with them. This can take anywhere from hours to days. The iMedix technology solves this problem by using an ensemble of advanced machine-learning algorithms to learn from the knowledge and experience of millions of patients to retrieve the most relevant health articles. The iMedix system is able to locate relevant patients and match them, so they can exchange valuable health information easily.
iMedix will generate revenue from online advertising and sponsorships. At the moment, we are focusing on building our community and optimizing the user experience on iMedix. Later on, we will slowly introduce advertising on the site.
4. Is your go to market approach direct-to-consumer, partnering, or both?
We aim to help as many people as possible. With that in mind, our go to market strategy is initially focused on direct-to-consumer. We’ve received great feedback and traffic and our community has grown tremendously in the last couple of months. In the last weeks, we were approached by several companies that were interested in partnerships. We are delighted to allow other sites to use our platform and even created a widget that will allow any site or blog to embed the search technology easily. You can check out the widget at http://www.imedix.com/SearchWidget. In the future we plan to work with strategic partners to provide a useful health resource and maximize our reach.
5. What is in your future product path that you're willing to discuss?
We plan on continuing to evolve as a resource that makes finding and sharing health information a simple, fast and effective process for consumers. The future product path will be to continue and develop our main concept that with the right tools and technology patients can help one another in making better health related decisions. In order to accomplish this, we plan on adding additional features to iMedix that will minimize the amount of research a certain individual will need to invest in order to locate health information. This will create value for patients based on our striving community and the medical anthology platform that we have developed so far. We believe that providing patients with relevant information is the key to answering their healthcare questions. In the next months you will see many changes in our product that will reflect the feedback we received from our loyal community members. Actually, our community members are the ones that guide us through our product path.
6. PHR (personal health records) has been very slow to takeoff, but now is showing signs of lift. What, in your view, are the key drivers going forward?
I agree with you. PHR will revolutionize healthcare as we know it. PHR is a good, but complex concept that is still slow to take off. The healthcare system has many stakeholders and the privacy issues are a true challenge. One of the key drivers for PHR going forward will be the initiative that Google and Microsoft are taking. Fortune 500 companies that are offering free and valuable health services on the Web will accelerate the adoption of PHR. In addition, federal legislation by the US government will quicken the process of PHR.
Another key factor in the evolution of the healthcare industry will be community powered services such as iMedix that will drive consumers to use the Web to make better health related decisions. These services will act as a gateway to ‘heavier’ Web applications such as PHR and will help accelerate the tipping point, which should occur within the next few years.
Read more in our 25-page segment analyses, one each on:
a. PHR
b. EMR
c. News/Search/Community
d. Digital Home Health.
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