By Hope Leman.  A health site wins my heart if it lowers my blood pressure from the get-go. I liked MedHelp from the start.

I usually don’t like sites that require to me to register. But MedHelp’s sign-up process was a breeze. And it endearingly remembered me 24 hours later—always a good sign. “Welcome back, hopeyj.”

Handsome, easily navigable interface. One feature that the mental health community might find useful is “My mood.” Users simply type in how they are feeling. I experimented with “happy,” “sad” and “suicidal.” It would be fascinating to know how members of the community would react if they saw the last of those phrases. I would find that a highly useful feature.

As a user of sites like Patients Like Me, I found I often noticed when a member of the community had written in a post about feeling down and in such cases I would write to others members asking them to write cheering notes to the person in a funk. Having such gauges right on the home page of MedHelp might do a lot to build emotional bonds between users, given that it would be easy enough to contact someone you follow on MedHelp by bookmarking their page and periodically checking that person’s emotional temperature. But where are RSS feeds for doing so—the Watch this Discussion features appears to be entirely email-based and not everybody wants email bulletins. And I know there was a nice little set of bookmarking tools, but I can’t find it now.

How to alert friends and family easily to the existence of MedHelp so that they could monitor my mood (which would be particularly useful if I had a condition like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—ALS—that might confine to home for long periods and render phone communication difficult)?

The Invite a Friend feature on the home page worked quite well, although it would not allow me to send a test message to myself, which I, like many users, like to do to ensure that we aren’t sending junk to friends and loved ones.

I was quite impressed by MedHelp. Indeed it is so feature-rich, content-filled and such a dream to navigate through that I am having trouble writing this review because I keep cruising through the site with such fluidity that I am not stopping to read in depth—so much to check out.

For example, on the home page there is, What’s New at MedHelp and I immediately checked out, “New: Rare Diseases community.” So what is a rare disease, I wondered. MedHelp helped out there, “This patient support community is for discussions relating to rare diseases and disorders.

Some example include: Aarskog syndrome, Acoustic Neuroma, Angelman Syndrome, Behcet Syndrome, Bell’s Palsy, Canavan Disease, Carbon Baby Syndrome, Charcot Marie Tooth Disease, Chromosome Monosomy Disorders…”

That ranks right up in helpfulness and authoritativeness with MedlinePlus.
“The gold standard for consumer health info.”

One outstanding useful feature of the Medical Support Communities is a dropdown menu that enables users to alert the site administrators as follows:
Spam
Miscategorized
Abuse

I immediately used this feature while visiting the ALS forum when I noticed that the first message really seemed to belong in a section dealing with Pediatrics and so clicked on Miscategorized and got the message, “Reported.” Presumably the user could then be redirected to a page where she would be much more likely to have her question addressed appropriately.

One especially nifty feature of the Forums is that you can click on Related tags and up pop (and pop is the right term given the admirable speed that pages load) useful links and resources, such as pages from medical dictionaries and links to related forums (in the case of the ALS forum, related tags alerted me to the fact that there is a Degenerative Diseases Community). That is a little inconsistent though and sometimes you get a page with just links to forum posts with no links to authoritative resources. That happened with General Neurology—I would have liked a link to a medical dictionary or an expert’s page on the subject, rather than solely general user comments.

These forums don’t seem as lively yet or anywhere near as frequented as those on comparable sites like Patients Like Me, which are established communities with genuine friendships maintained. But MedHelp has potential in this area and certainly has a more comprehensive range of medical conditions on offer for those hoping to generate a patient community than Patients Like Me does.

MedHelp does need some refinement in some areas. For instance, not every term has a link to a definition and there doesn’t seem any rhyme or reason to what is defined and what is not. Why, for example, do we find in the Neurology Community:

This forum is for questions and support regarding neurology issues such as: Alzheimer’s Disease, ALS, Autism, Brain Cancer, Cerebral Palsy, Chronic Pain, Epilepsy, Fibromyalgia, Headaches, MS, Neuralgia, Neuropathy, Parkinson’s Disease, RSD, Sleep Disorders, Stroke, Traumatic Brain Injury

That Alzheimer’s Disease, ALS, Autism, Epilepsy, Fibromyalgia, Cerebral Palsy and Stroke are linked to useful definitions, but MS and Parkinson’s Disease are not? But MedHelp seems to be very much on the right track in terms of its development.

And it certainly has an impressive list of medical partners, including medical people from such prestigious institutions as Mount Sinai Medical Center, the Cleveland Clinic and Massachusetts General Hospital. But it was not clear how much active involvement on the forums there is by the obviously well-credentialed moderators. On the ALS forum Patients Like Me, there is a lot of commentary by the resident neuroscientist Paul Wicks and the nurse, Emma. MedHelp so far lacks that same blend of community and practical, day-to-day advice and lively intellectual engagement among experts and users. Health consumers these days are pretty sophisticated and can see through take-money-and-run figurehead gambits. For the forums to take off on MedHelp there needs to be active involvement by the moderators. That sparks discussion among users. I know that from experience on Patients Like Me—I posted several times a day and could write Emma personally if I was concerned about the mood of a fellow member.

Also, MedHelp seems to lack a useful feature of Patients Like Me—the ability to privately email a member rather than just post a message for all the forum members in reply to another message.

But all in all, I was quite impressed. The ads are tasteful and the site is elegant and a model of web design. Those of us who are engaged in the construction and maintenance of health-related sites can learn a lot by roaming these pages.

This has been a long review—indicative of what a rich site this is.

MedHelp responds:

Thanks a lot for a great mention. I really enjoyed reading it.

The one thing that I noticed is that you mentioned that our communities were not active and since we are a community site that is concerning. We actually have 30x more users than PatientsLikeMe (comparison of our sites from Compete:
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/patientslikeme.com+medhelp.org/?metric=uv). I think you looked at a couple of our newer communities (like ALS and Rare Diseases) but if you look at some of the older ones (see below for examples), you will notice that they are extremely active. Also, we are one of the only sites that have doctors from top hospitals responding to hundreds of user questions every day for free.

I’ve included a few other comments below.

Thanks again for reviewing the site and let me know if you have any questions.

Best,
John De Souza
President and CEO

A few comments.

I’m not sure if you saw our health applications. These applications allow our members to track, monitor and share data on various health conditions. Below re a few examples of members’ trackers.
Ovulation – http://www.medhelp.org/user_trackers/show/70
Sleep – http://www.medhelp.org/user_trackers/show/8226?page=1
Pregnancy – http://www.medhelp.org/user_trackers/show/1875
Mood – http://www.medhelp.org/user_trackers/show/6198

In addition to the patient communities we have over 120 doctors from top hospitals in our “Ask-a-doctor” forums that respond to patient questions.

Here are some examples:
http://www.medhelp.org/forums/show/131 Ovarian Cancer with Mass General Hospital
http://www.medhelp.org/forums/show/128 – Respiratory disorders with National Jewish
http://www.medhelp.org/forums/show/274 – Liver transplant with Mt. Sinai

Below are some examples of our older communities.
Hepatitis C: http://www.medhelp.org/forums/show/75
Multiple Sclerosis: http://www.medhelp.org/forums/show/41
Heart Rhythm: http://www.medhelp.org/forums/show/92

In order to see the mood of people across the site you can view the people page which has a panel that shows recent moods in the right hand panel http://www.medhelp.org/people.