Popular medical app HealthTap just launched a new product called “Top Doctor Insights.” Using artificial intelligence, the new service provides users with completely personalized health information.
HealthTap is a resource for accessing free medical information provided by more than 64,000 doctors. Until now, it wasn’t much more than a database.
But with “Top Doctor Insights,” two people searching the same topic now receive completely different results. After a user types in a question, the service goes beyond searching for keywords and actually analyzes the content and semantic meaning of the inquiry. It couples the information with billions of data points and the users’s Heath Graph (a proprietary digital map of one’s personal health and well-being) to build a simple, personalized list of the best doctor insights on the topic.
“Now, for the first time ever, users on HealthTap can very quickly and conveniently get multiple insights from top doctors customized to their needs and wants right at their fingertips,” Healthtap Founder and CEO Ron Gutman said in a press release.
Personalization of online health information could revolutionize the whole industry, which — at this point— is shaky, to say the least. WebMD is notorious for leading every user to believe he’s having a heart attack or has cancer, and a study found that 90 percent of Wikipedia articles on the costliest medical conditions contain factual errors.
But despite all of this, the online medical industry is growing, and people are even paying to receive health care and advice via apps and websites. Just last week, we texted a therapist from an inflatable bubble in Madison Square Park to try TalkSpace, an app that’s let’s users receive text therapy 24-7 for rates ranging from $19 to $49 per week. A few months ago, we came across First Derm, an app that lets users send a dick pics to dermatologists for an STD diagnosis for $40.
With more people turning to technology for everything from cooking to medical opinions, straying from lists of generic symptoms seems best for everyone.
Courtesy: Betabeat