Medical social networks

March 22, 2007

I’m sure this isn’t a terribly *new* idea, but I’m not seeing any big names getting in to this. Given all the social networks that have exploded which simply focus on interests (flixter) or geography (facebook), giving people ’social networking’ tools to help communicate about their health and medical issues seems like a much more worthy use of time and effort.

We’ve have sixdegrees and later friendster and myspace all demonstrate the power of connecting users with some common trait, but it’s always been around previously existing friendships or relationships.  We then got things like linkedin.com and jobster.com focusing on business connections and jobhunting, and event
My colleague suggested that HIPAA might be a stumbling block - you’d be publishing information about people’s medical conditions. However, I think the ‘common carrier’ status of user-generated content sites recently upheld (can’t find the info now, but there was some recent US case which seemed to uphold the notion of a site’s inculpability regarding comments they host) would probably make that a pretty small concern. Getting users to agree to terms and conditions stating that the site owner is not liable for anything (which is pretty common T&C anyway) would ideally be a way around that liability as well. I can’t even find much on the web except for this article … Maybe it’s just not the done thing yet, using web 2.0 tech to take advantage of human medical situations?

Names that are already taken which prevent me from further pursuing this idea.

sickster.com, sickr.com, myhealthspace.com, mydiseasespace.com, whatailsme.com, imsick.com, medster.com, medstr.com - all gone.

myailmentspace.com and  sickstr.com ARE available (at least until some enterprising web 2.1 type reads my powerful insights here and snatches them away!)

Maybe I’m not as cutting edge as I think…

Posted in Business, Ideas, Media, Society, Web