Health and Wellness Portal [healthcaremagic.com]

Hi guys. Have you seen a sudden surge in the number of healthcare portals and websites in India ? I have been to most of them. It’s a good thing happening in India. Wanted to share a lot about the latest trends in the online health portals but could not find a right place to start until the guys at www.healthcaremagic.com allowed me to post it in their corporate blog. Thanks.

A strange thing that I have been seeing is that all the health portals are going down the route of being a yellow pages directory as well. Everyone lists down thousands of doctors and hospitals and most of the data records are either incomplete or wrong. What’s the use for such data when anyone can get it from Just Dial within seconds. The idea is to make use of the data and then provide services to the patients like fixing appointments or getting discounts. The pull of a portal is not because the portal has a few hundred thousand doctors listed. The strength is in providing me only 10 doctors in my city but they should be good and recommendable doctors.

Another aspect which is commonly seen is the Symptom tracker. The health websites are linked to sites like Harvard medical school or Mayo Clinic. Again, I feel it is useless after trying atleast 5 such sites. The point is that I get even more confused when these symptom trackers throw up 5-10 possible causes of my problem. I tried sore throat and fever. The result generated included all diseases that can cause sore throat including Throat Cancer. Can you imagine !! I come for a simple thing like sore throat and I get Throat Cancer as the cause. Never to visit such sites again. Best is to either call or have live chat with a doctor. If not, atleast send an email and get a response from a real doctor and not through an automated tool.

Third item which is slightly troublesome is the static content. I see sites with content from all over the world on it. Why so much of effort when I can google out the best content from parent sites or I can go to sites like wikipedia for authentic content.

The trend that is missing is the concept of Wellness and Health. Personalization. The best thing to see on sites like Healthcaremagic.com is that they give access to real doctors and the suggestion is 100% personalized to me. For the same problem, I get a different advice than what another patient with diabetes will get on healthcaremagic. This service is marvellous. Would like to see a few more things on your portal. You should provide interactive tools where I can create my own targets, create my own project and keep doing my own assessment. If I am 86 kgs and overweight by 12 kgs, there should be a tool that can assess my current situation and help me in creating a project for 12 months, in which I reduce 12 kgs.

I don’t know if this portal will have those features but atleast would love to see such features on the portal. What about alternative therapies ? Ayurveda, Yoga, homeopathy, meditation etc. Atleast, the portals can provide content for that as it is difficult to find indianized wellness content through google / wikipedia.

Anyways, good to share my views. If anyone shares the same idea, please connect with me by posting a comment on this post.

Visit www.healthcaremagic.com for More !!