The Google of medicine

Medicine and technology have been advancing in tandem during recent decades.

By ARIEL SHAPIRA
Medivizor Short Explainer Video
You’re searching for information on diseases and find yourself drowning in the endless results you get? The start-up Medivizor developed a website that offers a targeted search after answering a few questions.
One of the worst days in life is the one in which we receive the bad news: Someone close to us is seriously sick, or even, G-d forbid, we ourselves are.
Whether it is cancer, diabetes or any other disease, a moment after hearing about the bad news, we begin to digest it. We want to know what this sickness is, what it means, what we are about to go through, what action to take, how to treat it, and how our daily lives will change.
Three entrepreneurs have joined forces to deal with this issue: Dr. Oren Fuerst, a veteran entrepreneur and serial investor in companies; Tal Givoly, a senior leader in technology companies, the most recent of which is Amdocs, where he served as chief scientist; and Prof. Steven Kaplan, an international expert in the field of urology, who published many articles on the subject. They established Medivizor, which offers an easy and accessible way for finding medical information.
The website resolves several issues: When you search with Google or any other search engine for a specific medical problem, you get countless results and a huge amount of information that it is almost impossible to deal with. In addition, one can’t always tell whether the information is authoritative or not. The website also makes it easier for doctors by helping them deal with patients and their families but cutting out a number of irrelevant questions.
Medivizor offers a solution in which potential users are asked to answer about 15 questions regarding their specific condition.
These are the key questions an expert doctor needs to know to determine the treatment path. After answering these questions, each patient receives an individualized detailed summary of his or her medical condition and information about relevant research and clinical studies.
In the future, the website may help patients and their loved ones find medical centers that specialize in their illness.
Although Medivizor contains information on many medical conditions, particularly on the most common ones, the website still does not cover all of them. In collaboration with physicians, the company is working to expand its database and the scope of the medical conditions its website covers.
Matching researchers
The company wants to help match researchers who wish to carry out clinical trials with patients who are interested in participating in such trials. It is committed to maintaining the privacy of patients and the confidentiality of the information they provide. This information is not shared without the patients’ consent. Medivizor plans to offer its services to doctors and professionals so that they can be updated conveniently and quickly about cutting-edge relevant information.
According to Medivizor, the website currently includes information about 75 percent of cardiovascular and heart disease, 90% of cancer incidents and all the different types of diabetes. The system relies on the wisdom of crowds, and as the number of users grows, the service for all subscribers will improve and become more effective.
Currently, the service on the website is in English, but it will be offered in other languages in the future. Medivizor has a team of five members and about 25 experts around the world. It has raised $1.2 million from angel investors.
My personal opinion
Medicine and technology have been advancing in tandem during recent decades.
Over time, medical professionals are using technological developments that improve medical care for a growing number of people in the world.
Sharing information is a significant factor in the ability of medicine to prevent disease and provide relevant information to patients.
The ability to reduce the information gaps that exist between different locations worldwide and to reach patients in remote locations is a challenge that until recently was very difficult to overcome. The Internet has exposed many people to a vast amount of information, including medical information that can help them.
But there’s a catch: Overload of information may not necessarily provide a better solution.
Patients and doctors can get lost in the sea of information.
The overflow of information, much of it unreliable or unprofessional, leads doctors to ignore it altogether. The tendency of some doctors to advise their patients to ignore what they learn online and listen only to them, as reflected in a recent television advertisement, is unjustified.
Patients and family members are entitled to learn about the significance of their illness, its various treatment options and how to be better prepared to deal with the challenges they face, not only through their doctors. Medivizor allows them to do so.
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