icyou - More healthcare video
November 14, 2007
Our 2007 Blogger’s Choice winner for healthcare blogs points us to another health related video site, icyou. While I’m having some problems with the rendering of the site in Firefox as I type this, it could be because of the very poor wifi connection I have at this time.
icyou is the kind of site that really appeals to me, at least in concept. The site was launched in September at the Health 2.0 conference and dubs itself the “youtube of health videos” (how many “youtubes” of anything can we have?). So what is it?
icyou.com invites people to upload and share their healthcare stories online. It has quickly become home to the most diverse collection of healthcare videos on the Web, and continues to grow as patients, caregivers, doctors and experts upload and share their healthcare stories. It also is home to video coverage of healthcare events held across the nation produced by the icyou.com team.
It is free for anyone to watch videos on icyou.com, but by joining the community (also free), members can upload, comment on, save to favorites and send videos to a friend.
In other words it is a mix of user generated content as well as a resource for people to post conference events etc. The site also hopes to build a community around the healthcare videos. The fact that the videos are embeddable (the player reminds me of the Blip.tv player) is a good thing, although once again, I am not a fan of the site design. The video embedded below is a video from Pfizer on HIV, which suggests they already have some feelers into pharma companies
icyou does have a healthcare background, having been launched by BenefitFocus, a healthcare IT company. That somewhat explains its apparent targeting to what I like to call the “health and wellness” crowd. While the recently covered emedtv seems to be a video version of WebMD, i.e. an information resource, icyou has the feel of a site that caters to people sharing diet and treatment stories, etc (the management team also indicates such a positioning). That might actually be a smart move, since they are likely to attract some fairly decent advertising dollars if the site gets enough eyeballs.
One question I have is about video accuracy. Since it is a user generated content site, and has medical professionals involved, it is probable that they have checks and balances in place, but I do wonder what kind of lines will be drawn if people start posting videos on psuedo-science. Will there be any disclaimers, etc in place? The terms of suggest don’t give any hints in that direction. They do seem to suggest that anything goes and self-policing might be the chosen model.
Technorati Tags: icyou, healthcare, video, user generated content
Posted by Deepak Singh | Filed Under Audio/Video, Healthcare
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3 Responses to “icyou - More healthcare video”
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From my personal experience with health problems I have found the stories from regular people on public discussion boards to be invaluable because they provide scenarios, which are lacking from clinical studies.
The problem is that by reducing everything to abstract correlations of averaged metrics you lose the multi-dimensional information of anecdotes.
Knowing that 70% of a population obtained some symptomatic relief with a certain drug does not help me predict if it will be useful for me specifically.
I had an arrhythmia problem for most of my life that no doctor was able to completely control. It is only when I went to discussion posts looking for people with the same types of symptoms and similar history to mine that I discovered the right medicine - and also the right dosage (which was key in my situation) that was finally effective.
Many people experiment for years trying to fix their health problems and their experience can be very useful.
Of course you take that information and consult with your doctor to make sure it is safe before trying anything.
Good point. Here in Seattle there is a company (still mostly in stealth mode) called Trusera, formerly PeerWisdom. That’s pretty much the goal of the company, which was born after an experience that its CEO had.
Network effects in such cases work very well. My concern is that people might start using this information to supersede their physicians instead of making it part of the overall package and the basis for a conversation
Your questions about icyou.com are valid. There is a new site whicn was designed by physicians for physicians, and their patients, VideoMD.com. This site focuses on physician generated video health information. It has no pharma, or media bias. While all physicians can upload videos for their patients on an individual page of VideoMD, all featured videos are chosen based on medical content, and quality.
There is also a video blogging area for patients to build online
communities.