What would a “good” WebMD look like? • Hacker News Board

Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?

#11

Post by BurningFrog » Tue, Aug 30, 2022, 1:48 PM UTC

oneplane wrote: post #5

If only there was a profession where knowledge, experience and continuous development are used to provide advice and care for individuals who may not have specialised in that same area of expertise.

I assume medical websites are somehow kept vague in order to steer us to pay these highly regulated professionals a fee for a visit.

Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?

#12

Post by lastofthemojito » Tue, Aug 30, 2022, 1:50 PM UTC

I always figured it was due to liability. WebMD wants the monetizable traffic but not the liability of ya know, providing health care. So they profit off of the user's duress and just recommend they see a health care professional anyhow.

Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?

#13

Post by bshep » Tue, Aug 30, 2022, 1:52 PM UTC

BurningFrog wrote: post #11

oneplane wrote: post #5

If only there was a profession where knowledge, experience and continuous development are used to provide advice and care for individuals who may not have specialised in that same area of expertise.

I assume medical websites are somehow kept vague in order to steer us to pay these highly regulated professionals a fee for a visit.

I’d say its more likely that they are vague because of regulations and liability.

IE you cant/shouldn’t give blanket medical advice and if you do you may be liable if someone has a bad outcome from the advice.

Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?

#14

Post by jandrese » Tue, Aug 30, 2022, 1:52 PM UTC

debacle wrote: post #10

Compare WebMD to examine.com The difference? You pay for examine.com. The outcome? The highest quality site for information on supplements, vitamins, etc available on the Internet. WebMD just needs to be good enough for Google.

> The outcome? The highest quality site for information on supplements, vitamins, etc available on the Internet.

This just sounds like snake oil advertising but with the privilege of paying to see it.

Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?

#15

Post by jjar » Tue, Aug 30, 2022, 1:54 PM UTC

A better question might be: Why is the private sector responsible for providing accurate health information? As this article shows, the incentives for people running medical websites and the people reading them are not aligned. I'd say the UK NHS website and symptoms/medications pages hit the nail on the head - https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/. It has no advertising and provides short, easily readable and actionable information on the majority of conditions and the correct way to use and take many different sorts of medication.

And crucially - if the information present is not sufficient, clear and obvious UI elements that direct the next best steps to get the help you need, whether that be ringing the non emergency helpline or immediately going to A&E. (It's been commented on before, but the new UK government sites are very consistently structured and open source their design systems https://service-manual.nhs.uk/design-system)

Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?

#16

Post by candlemas » Tue, Aug 30, 2022, 1:56 PM UTC

Most medical research is junk science that doesn't replicate so any site relying on those studies is probably going to be useless anyway. That could be why the satisfaction is so low.

Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?

#17

Post by stevage » Tue, Aug 30, 2022, 1:57 PM UTC

The phenomenon they describe for health information is, IMHO, absolutely rife across many different domains. Try looking up information about gardening, plant management, home improvement, etc - you'll find the same thing. Search results dominated by sites that have mastered the art of producing SEO-optimised "content" that is not authoritative, full of waffle, and not especially helpful.

For whatever reason, the business model of "draw a huge amount of traffic" outcompetes the business model of "provide a really good source of information".

It's interesting to ponder why in very specific domains, that's not the case: for instance, StackOverflow dominates in programming queries, and provides very useful content.

Someone much smarter than me should write a really good blog post about this.

Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?

#18

Post by goethes_kind » Tue, Aug 30, 2022, 1:57 PM UTC

BurningFrog wrote: post #11

oneplane wrote: post #5

If only there was a profession where knowledge, experience and continuous development are used to provide advice and care for individuals who may not have specialised in that same area of expertise.

I assume medical websites are somehow kept vague in order to steer us to pay these highly regulated professionals a fee for a visit.

They have already been experimenting with expert knowledge systems in hospitals for decades. I am not sure what the result of that is but I rarely ever hear of them anymore.

ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system

Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?

#19

Post by cratermoon » Tue, Aug 30, 2022, 1:57 PM UTC

As other comments hint but don't directly say: the incentives for WebMD are the same as any other website: revenue through ad sales. WebMD is owned by Internet Brands, which is owned by private equity, so of course it's not just revenue, but profit. Any website needs a source of money, just to pay to keep the lights on, much less develop and maintain the content. As long as ad-driven revenue is the incentive, the result will always be perversely steered towards attention-getting content.

Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?

#20

Post by MR4D » Tue, Aug 30, 2022, 1:58 PM UTC

I work in Finance in the US, and I think our industry has a good model to build on. The SEC requires a decent amount of information for all sorts of investments and financial entities to publish at various times - everything from IPOs to management changes.

I'm not sure if the FDA/CDC/NIH/etc has anything like this, but they should probably start requiring it and/or providing it.

I think this would go a long way to solving this problem.