What would a “good” WebMD look like?

I have a story for all of you on this topic, strap yourselves in.

We had the solve for this issue, and we had it back in 2013.

I remember interviewing for a brand new startup as the first employee, the idea was that you had an app/website and got the doctor to add what they told you into this app. I remember sitting there and saying during the interview, something like "That adds stress onto the doctors who are already stressed, you should be giving relief to them, perhaps what we need is something better than google/WebMD so people might not need to come in IF they find their anwser".

So that was what we decided to do, to make a App/Website to give anwsers better than Google/WebMD, verified by doctors on our board.

We called it Your.MD.

It was a symptom checker, it took search queries like google, and ran NLP against that, then asked follow up questions based off the query... It worked really really well.

Then our Chairman punched our first CEO, the CEO left, and we got a second CEO in, he got a couple board seats, and the writing was on the wall.

He brought in some guy from Talking Tom... remember that talking cat app? The new CEO and this guy decided to change the working symptom checker and turn it into a chatbot.... we protested about as much as we could as founding members.. but it fell on deaf ears..

We were forced to destroy something that worked perfectly for the abomination that became what Your.MD was...

The CEO fired us all... well he tried, but labor laws are amazing here in Norway, so I got a nice exit.

The CEO installed himself as the "Founder" on everything including the Wikipedia page.. I think the company has some new name now.. dunno don't care.

But yeah.. We had the solve for this, the problem was always that people google things, and google isn't great (read terrible) at this problem, and WebMD suuuucks because .. well this article says it better than I could.

tangential resources for nutritional/dietary supplements:

Consumer focus: https://examine.com/ Professional focus: https://naturalmedicines.therapeuticresearch.com/

Both sites maintain nice monographs that curate evidence and provide easy to interpret effectiveness scores.

Natural Medicines database goes even further and maintains a database for commercial products.

I find both incredibly useful for evaluating ingredients and their structure/function effects

yeah they all pander to hypochondriacs and people who suffer from anxiety. Oh and they all absolutely prey on new parents. Never ever resort to the internet as a new parent, just call your pediatrician. As a father of two, i can't stress the previous sentence enough.

Not when a large percentage of Americans can’t afford a visit to their doctor, that disclaimer is only going to be ignored and users will look elsewhere.

I've been involved in an attempt to do this at a smaller scale, for a specific discipline: https://maxfacts.uk/ – which aims to be a complete resource for patients and professionals in the oral and maxillofacial field. Like WebMD, but up-to-date, properly researched, and very thorough.

The linked article here talks about having structured, quantitive information, but I think this might be an engineer's view on medicine. The reality on the ground is much messier. We tried to give people enough information on medical practice, explanations on the biological/chemical mechanisms, and other resources to make their own informed choices about their treatment and care. For example, trying to explain the mechanics of taste, and texture for eating food so that people can understand what kind of adaptations they can make to improve their quality of life. I think we probably fall short of that goal sometimes because our material is overly technical or scientific but it's a work-in-progress.