Once voted the best place to have a heart attack (because so many of our citizens know CPR), the heart of the greater Seattle Web community is beating loudly these days for its
vitality with health matters online.
Perhaps no one is doing more for global health than the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation from their new downtown headquarters. Microsoft’s pioneering HealthVault, led by former Drugstore.com and MSN chief, Peter Neupert, is seeking a better way to track and document health care, letting you store personal health information in one convenient place and share it with others you trust. The notion of universal record keeping has been lauded as one of the keys to streamlining health care costs. Google Health has also quickened the pulse of record-keeping change as a worthy competitor.
Bellevue’s Limeade is seeking to alleviate the high cost of health care on the job by offering businesses a Limeade Employee Vitality™ assessment. By screening employees and focusing on a small number of people in a workforce with significant health risks or chronic conditions, and then encouraging them into becoming “less of a risk, ” Limeade strives to increase worker efficiency and productivity.
In addition to enhancing the doctor-patient relationship through multimedia video and chat sites like HeathTalk.com and HealthWatch.tv, Renton’s Sesame Communications.com is leading the charge for dentists and orthodontists nationwide as a leader in patient communications software who is also building online social media profiles for doctors on MySpace and WebMD.
Seattle’s home bred health search engine, Healia.com, has spawned a network of communities at http://communities.healia.com which recently won three Silver W3 Awards in the categories of health, community and social networking, prevailing over more than 3,000 entries.
Peer group conversation about pressing health matters, from autism to weight control, is blossoming at Seattle’s Trusera.com where people from around the world can share support, ideas and inspiration. 69% of health consumers rely more on themselves and their own process than on their doctors in making health decisions. That’s not surprising when the average doctor’s visit in the U.S. is less than twenty minutes.
A new video series produced by Trusera called “Just One” profiles six families (including children) dealing with Breast Cancer, Autism, Asperger’s and Lyme disease. The purpose of the series is to encourage more people to share their health experiences and “Pay It Forward, ” something the Northwest is doing not just locally, but on a global scale. [24×7]
