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

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

#71

Post by oneplane » Tue, Aug 30, 2022, 2:30 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 suppose there are lots of possibilities, but regardless of steering, fees and visits, a non-expert is unlikely to be able to self-diagnose, read a bit of text, and come up with a treatment plan.

The problem isn't information availability, it's experience and interpretation which is not something you can do on an individual basis 'on the side', hence the expertise requirement. If the subject matter at hand was as simple to deal with as "see X, apply Y, get result Z", then that would be great. But as this is not an exact science, such a method does not truly exist, and therefore cannot be made effective in a listicle on a website or other medium.

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

#72

Post by jjar » Tue, Aug 30, 2022, 2:31 PM UTC

SilasX wrote: post #37

jjar wrote: post #15

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 i…

Interesting! But the first link you gave is just a list of conditions, which requires that I already know what my problem is. Is there a page that goes from symptoms to likely causes and what to do, like WebMD?

You can search at the top for symptoms: https://imgur.com/a/y5RUk5x

I'd say if I were to suggest improvements the symptom search could definitely be better and more prominently placed. In the UK I personally (and I'd imagine most people) get to the NHS website directly from Google, which is better at finding more relevant pages.

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

#73

Post by robbiep » Tue, Aug 30, 2022, 2:31 PM UTC

jefftk wrote: post #30

Doctors generally use a service like UpToDate, which I understand is pretty good. Issues with providing the same quality of service to consumers include: * Doctors are willing to pay a lot (ex: UpToDate is ~$500/y) and you might not be able to keep such high fees for doctors if you also offered a great consumer-focused option. * Consumers have a wide range of experience levels, where it's going to be hard to make a p…

It’s a different service because it’s generally quite technical, and also it has a fairly large editorial team constantly reviewing and updating the content. The ‘simple English’ UpToDate is Wikipedia or the NHS website

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

#74

Post by m3kw9 » Tue, Aug 30, 2022, 2:31 PM UTC

One that doesn’t say cancer in the same list as other possibilities every time you try to find out why there is a small issue. It’s a UX/UI issue they can solve

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

#75

Post by skybrian » Tue, Aug 30, 2022, 2:31 PM UTC

thomasfedb wrote: post #60

skybrian wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like UpToDate is $60 a month, or you can subscribe for a week for $20.

They have patient/caregiver subscriptions. I'm not sure if it's the same set of articles that doctors get access to. The ones I use are definitely not written for the layperson, though they do have a whole series of articles written for laypersons "The Basics" and "More Than The Basics" which are designed to be handed out by doctors.

Those prices are for the patient subscription. $20 for temporary access doesn’t seem too bad for medical information if you need it, but most people aren’t going to pay it without trying it out first. Particularly when free info is available.

https://store.uptodate.com/ccrz__ProductDetails?viewState=De...

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

#76

Post by jvans » Tue, Aug 30, 2022, 2:32 PM UTC

stevage wrote: post #17

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 bus…

This seems like a side effect of centralized power in general. You see it at amazon too which is full of either subpar goods or counterfeit products[1]. It becomes a game of manipulating these companies into showing your product/good/service, and only part of winning that game is producing a quality product

[1] https://davidgaughran.com/amazon-has-a-fake-book-problem/

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

#77

Post by swores » Tue, Aug 30, 2022, 2:33 PM UTC

_fat_santa wrote: post #61

jjar wrote: post #15

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 i…

I think the issue isn't data, its the "packaging". Going through the NHS website, it's useful if you already know what you have. I'll use myself as an example because I had an ingrown hair on my neck a few weeks back, went on google and I didn't search for "Ingrown Hair" because at that stage, I didn't know that it was an ingrown hair. I searched for "bumps on your neck" which led me to conclude that it was an ingrow…

NHS already offers a (fairly rudimentary, last I checked) diagnostic tool in the form of NHS 111, which as well as being a phone number that people in the UK can call to talk to someone, is also a website (https://111.nhs.uk/) where you can give your symptom(s) and get a suggestion if possible causes.

It may not yet be good enough in all cases, I'm not sure, but is that what you're asking for? I'm not quite sure as you dived into things like data licensing without being clear on your actual hoped end result.

(Of course, the 111 site is designed as part of the wider NHS system, so when in doubt it's more likely to give advice to speak to a GP / call to speak to a nurse / visit a hospital, than to say "not sure, here are all the conditions it could be". But as it gets better I expect it to be able to do both.)

Not to mention that the main NHS site also lets you search for symptoms in the main search bar, so you don't need to know the condition to use it to search for possible conditions. edit: as better pointed out by jjar here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32650958

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

#78

Post by peter_retief » Tue, Aug 30, 2022, 2:33 PM UTC

The health sector will probably be the last to get disrupted mainly because it is tightly controlled and regulated.

Regulation probably isn't a bad thing in itself but if it isn't used to enforce the status quo, keep control and set prices.

I have this idea that health data should be open sourced, I have no problems with my continuous blood pressure, sugar levels and pulse rate (etc) being used in machine learning to identify clusters that might be useful. Just a thought for now.

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

#79

Post by lotsofpulp » Tue, Aug 30, 2022, 2:33 PM UTC

BurningFrog wrote: post #35

bshep wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's my point! Regulations have been set up so you have to pay an AMA member to get any information that might be labeled "medical advice".

There is tons of medical advice. Wikipedia, cdc, health.gov, mayoclinic, webmd, Reddit forums, hacker news, etc.

You can even get fake diagnosis and fake healthcare from chiropractors who are allowed to advertise themselves as doctors, and fake medicine from naturopaths or whatever who are also allowed to call themselves doctor.

I am using fake to mean unsupported by evidence in the form of sufficiently blind trials and whatever else is needed to qualify as scientifically sound (not the same as FDA approved).

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

#80

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Aug 30, 2022, 2:39 PM UTC

jjar wrote: post #15

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 i…

[deleted]