“I wasn’t surprised when iMedix recently won the Best New Startup at the Crunchies 2007 competition. I can actually see the need in a community such as iMedix, and clearly I’m not the only one thinking like that.” -Orli Yakuel

Guest Author Orli Yakuel.

The original post is here:

Israeli-based iMedix is a free service that helps users find and share health information. Now, you may think… health information? Who the hell wants to share their health problems? Well, more than 340,000 monthly unique visitors think differently and so am I, and I’ll explain why: We all know that sharing info over the Web today is very common, and it doesn’t need to stop when it’s come to your personal stuff, as long as you have control over your data, you can enjoy the benefits instead of thinking otherwise. One of the things that I learned over the last two years or so is that people like you and me are building the biggest database in the world. Everyone can join along and share something from their knowledge. This is the beauty in open platforms. This openness and transparency invites users to share just about everything, and it’s simply because EVERYONE has something to share.

As for iMedix, it is almost like they took a scene from real-life and placed it on the Web. When you have a medical problem, you are most likely to talk about it with your family, friends, or even with several doctors, to get as many opinions as you can. Same on iMedix, you can get a second opinion but from people that have the same symptoms, conditions and went through the treatments. Not only that, you can share your experiences, insights, maybe fears in a secure, supportive environment that was built specifically to fulfill this important need. Within one click, users can find and communicate with each other in real-time using the iMedix web chat (That I must say, impressed me by not being so intrusive), or send personal messages between them, which is wonderful because you always know someone is there for you when you most need it.

Besides that, iMedix is able to quickly search a large database of health information that contains millions of articles of any symptom, condition or treatment. Those articles are ranked by the community, so you can be sure you’ll get the most relevant result to your search and save hours of valuable research time.

I’ve been exclusively told that iMedix is about to release a new design which will include these new features (some of the features are already live):

* New and easy to use navigation and header – live as of now.
* People Search – search engine for patients! Now you find patients that suffer from similar conditions and filter them by age, gender, geographic location, etc – live now.
* New and improved auto-complete (interface + smart health dictionary) with more than 100,000 symptoms, conditions, drugs and treatments – live as of now.
* Entirely new homepage – live in a week or two
* People who searched for also searched for… Similar to Amazon’s recommendation engine, iMedix is now developing a system that will recommend better ways of searching for health information using successful terms that were used by other community members. The first version will be released soon.

I’d also like to explain why I’m thinking Google Health is missing this one, and I’m basing my thoughts on an alpha demo that I saw last week: So of course, I was very impressed by this upcoming application that is able to connect you with your healthcare provider like never before, but what about the truly needed ‘patient to patient’ approach? Because frankly, when it comes to this Internet era, this need can’t be ignored.

In the mean time, if you do have medical problems, don’t fight them alone, join a community that really care because they simply know how you feel.

iMedix growth: