Healia – your guide to healthy decisions:
Health Search Engine and Online Community

by Tom Eng, President and Founder, Healia

After a long career in public health and health policy, I founded Healia many years ago with initial funding from the National Cancer Institute (part of NIH).  The vision then—and remains today—is that universal access to high quality health information and support is a fundamental human right.

Healia’s mission is to help people make the best health decisions by facilitating access to trusted and personalized health information and support.  This is accomplished through Healia’s patent-pending search engine, physician-reviewed Health Guides, and our recently launched Healia Health Communities.
Let’s see how someone (let’s called her Mary) who was just diagnosed with diabetes might use Healia. Not surprisingly, Mary hasn’t absorbed much of what was relayed to her during her brief visit to her doctor.  In her heightened urgency to know and understand what this means for her life, she logs on to Healia.

Improving access to high quality health information
Mary starts off her information quest by reading the physician-reviewed Healia Health Guide on Diabetes, which provides a comprehensive overview of the disease and includes tips for further conversations with her doctor.

Mary then does a search on “diabetes” on Healia and finds that only credible sources of information are returned as a result of Healia’s proprietary technology that minimizes spam and poor quality content. Being African-American, she chooses to personalize the diabetes search results to find those that are more relevant for African-Americans. Healia’s ability to filter results by both demographic factors (e.g., age, gender and race/ethnicity) and content focus (e.g., prevention, diagnosis, treatment) is unique in the search industry.

After reviewing the consumer-oriented links on the Healia Web search engine, Mary uses the Healia PubMed/Medline search tool to research published studies about diabetes and African-Americans from a database of more than 15 million abstracts. Mary knows that, when she may need experimental treatments, she can use the Healia Clinical Trials search engine to find constantly updated clinical trials relevant to diabetes and African-Americans.

Improving access to personalized health support
Even though we can gain a good understanding of a health topic through online documents, most of us really value the perspective and insight of other people who have had similar experiences. Thus, we recently launched Healia Communities recognizing that learning from others can be extremely helpful when faced with an important health decision.

When Mary visits Healia Communities, she finds a safe and trusted online community for hundreds of health topics. All services are free and can be used anonymously whenever the need arises. Each member has full control of their privacy settings. And, when Mary needs to find someone like herself to connect with about a health issue, she can use the Healia Communities matching feature to locate someone.

Healia routinely partners with trusted health organizations to reach more people. For example, the diabetes-related communities on Healia are presented in collaboration with the American Diabetes Association, which is providing diabetes experts to answer questions.

After reading several health journal entries, Mary decides to write a note about the question about foot ulcers.  For times when Mary needs trusted advice from a healthcare professional, she turns to the Healia Communities Health Experts, a panel of experienced physicians, nurses, and other health professionals who will answer her health questions for free.

How accurate are meter readings?

To recognize and reward active contributors to Healia Communities, all members accumulate Healia Points for various activities, such as answering someone’s questions. Each week, members who have earned the highest number of Healia Points for the previous week are recognized on the home page as the “Week’s Top Contributors.” Currently, the Top Contributors receive a free annual subscription to a magazine from Meredith Corp., Healia’s parent company.

We believe that the resources and technologies provided by Healia can help the millions of people like Mary find the high quality information and personalized support that they need to live healthier lives. We are constantly mindful of user needs and would appreciate any reader feedback about our products.

As a pioneer in online consumer health, Healia will continue in the coming years to leverage the power of emerging technologies to improve access to health information and support for all. It is our sincere hope that Healia will become an integral part of people’s health decision-making process and that we can play a role in improving health and healthcare in the world.
“Week’s Top Contributors.”