This is not a Test | This is real life.

Timing can be a strange thing in life. My wife, a cardiology RN, just got a call that her brother is in the hospital ICU tonight after suffering a heart attack, or a myocardial infarction, as I have heard her say. Only it wasn’t, really. My wife said that technically he did not have a heart attack, but rather a Troponin attack. Whatever it was, he was 90% occluded (clogged) in one artery, and they had to put a stent in. In another artery they performed a balloon angioplasty. That’s a lot of medical terminology! Perfectly clear to my wife/nurse, but not to me.

What should I do? Google? Call a doctor?

But what if I hadn’t married a cardiology nurse? What if it was my brother? Most people that I know would turn on their computers and start to google those keywords: stent, angioplasty, troponin, infarction, and so on. But would that really produce the best understanding of what was happening to a family member or close friend?

Without a doubt, I have heard from people who would say do not go near that computer! They would argue that physicians do not want people to self-diagnose themselves (or others) by using, or rather misusing, computer supplied information. Call a doctor. But it’s 9:00 at night. Does my family doctor really want me to call him at home to ask him what a stent is and if my brother-in-law is going to be alright?

One nurse, one doctor.

As a cardiology nurse, my wife naturally works with a cardiologist. (Alan Binder, MD) So my methodology was pretty simple; I loaded her up with a bunch of Health search engines, and asked her to review them with Dr. Binder and report back their opinions. They certainly did not check all of the ones that I have - there are too many! Of all the verticals that we track, job search, video search, blog search, you name it, the Health vertical space is by far the most crowded. Clearly someone out there wants people to use a search engine when they have a health related question!

The Disclaimer

What follows is just general feedback from one nurse and one doctor. Ask ten doctors how they feel about alt search engines, and you may get ten different answers. We are in no way endorsing any of these websites. If you have an actual medical question or condition, you should absolutely ask your PCP or family doctor how he or she feels about this issue, and which, if any, search engines they recommend.

Item the first; are you a HCP?

The first observation that Dr. Binder and my wife made is that some search engines are designed to be used by Health Care Professionals (HCP); doctors and nurses. They simply are not intended to be used by non-medical people like you or me. Other search engines, however, are clearly targeted for health consumers or patients.

The second thing they noted was that some of the sites had very Google-like home pages. Essentially just the Search Box with some graphics around it. Other sites were more like health information portals, more Yahoo! like, chock full of links and topics, related articles and categories. Given this wide spectrum, they much preferred the latter; those home pages that provided a wealth of information right up front.

And the winner is…

It should come as no surprise that the gold standard, both for doctors and patients, is WebMD . The quality of the information is impeccable, and it provides a wealth of links and related information (they checked out the page on Heart Attacks and Unstable Angina).

Another site they liked was the official site of the NIH; the National Institutes of Health , and a related site, PubMed . Another good site is revolutionhealth , a new Top 100 alt, which derives information from well-known sources such as the Mayo Clinic.

What about the other Alternative Search Engines?

One of the other Top 100 alts that they liked is CognitionSearch (in Beta - as are most of the alts). With CognitionSearch you can select via check boxes what sources you want to include, such as the well-known Medline Abstracts, or the Center for Disease Control (CDC). They noted that some of the choices were good for HCP, and others for consumers, and suggested that they be better segregated on the home page.

Healthline and Kosmix-Health are also Top 100 alts. They considered Healthline to be a lighter version of Medline, which might make it more accessible to non-medical professionals, and they liked Healthline’s ‘Symptom Search’ feature. Kosmix’s approach is to present the results in categories for the user, and it returned information separated into Articles, News, Blogs, and so on.

But what about googling?

When my wife googled the phrase - heart attack - the first result returned was a Wikipedia article. Not too surprising, but as a nurse, my wife would much prefer that the first result would have been the second or third ones -the NIH and the AHA (American Heart Association). Still, they were in the top three, and that’s pretty good.

…and the runners up

1. Right Health
2. Diagnosaurus
3. GenieKnows
4. gopubmed
5. Healia
6. mamma - health
7. MEDgle
8. Medstory
9. Medline PLus (Spanish)
10. iMedix (coming soon)

And that’s just the first ten!

A final word

One thing that my wife and Dr. Binder would want you to know is that you do not have to use a search engine at all. If your question is heart-related, look up the American Heart Association’s website. If it’s about Diabetes, go to the American Diabetes Association’s site, and so forth. They are often very rich and well organized sources of information.

Thanks to my my wife, Laura E. Knight, RN and to Dr. Alan J. Binder. Dr. Binder is Board Certified in Internal Medicine and Cardiovascular Disease and practices at the University of Virginia Medical Center.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 6th, 2007 at 10:54 pm and is filed under Verticals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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