This venture is giving people access to reliable medical information for a better life.
Google processes over 1 billion health-related searches a day. That’s 70,000 searches a minute of people looking for health and medical information. An astonishing volume that creates a $2.4 billion health information market.
And, as we found out during the Covid-19 pandemic, there is a distressing amount of misinformation on the internet, leading patients to be confused and physicians to be frustrated.
Fortunately a practicing physician — who is also a clinical professor at the medical school at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign – launched a new venture, DoveMed, to help solve this problem. DoveMed is a comprehensive platform that links patients, healthcare providers, hospitals, clinics, and medical systems together, providing physician-approved health information to improve patient health and well-being.
The platform currently has over 36,000 pieces of original content, written and/or reviewed by physicians. Patients can find relevant information and they can also connect with doctors in their area. The can view provider ratings, participate in trials, read the latest research, and read physician blogs.
We’re entering a whole new era on the internet. The traditional search model established by Google 20 years ago is being disrupted by new models such as ChatGPT, Bard, and Bing.
An even more profound shift is that young people are less likely to use search engines at all— they get all their information from social media. Recent studies show that nearly 15% of consumers turn to social media for medical information and in fact young people are much more likely to turn to TikTok for medical information than they are to Google. It’s a paradigm shift in the way that consumers look for information — and that has some worrying implications for the spread of misinformation.
DoveMed is addressing all this and more, with an innovative digital platform designed to provide reliable healthcare information that helps people make better choices for themselves and their loved ones.
