Your personal health: iMedix redux

January 7, 2008

Some days ago, I blogged about iMedix, a health search and social networking site, which really appealed to me at first look. During the holidays had a chance to have a wonderful chat with Iri Amirav, one of the co-founders of the company. Iri was quite engaging, and shed some additional insights into the company and its goals.

iMedix has its origins in the mind of Amir Leitersdorf, the company’s other founder, who convinced Iri into building a very smart diagnostic platform after failing to find relevant health information online. After talking to various experts in the search and medical fields they realized that wasn’t quite possible at this point in time and decided to develop a health search engine that would improve as more people interacted with it.

iMedix is still a small company, but is definitely on the right track. Health search and information is getting to be a crowded field, but I have a feeling iMedix is going to have a fine exit some day, when the industry starts consolidating. What I found encouraging was that they realize that a health search site carries great responsibility, and they are well aware of their limitations. For example, Iri specifically mentioned that it was not their intent or competency to recommend hospitals, but one could easily see that coming about from the interpersonal interactions, the social graph as it were, developing on the site.

Which brings me to the social aspects of the site. In the accompanying screencast, I talk about my concerns with some of the limitations of the social features, but in general it seems that the amount of interaction between users of the site is very encouraging. The real challenge will be to see how much the social layer results in improved results, especially for less common conditions. Iri’s comments on the social aspects of the side made my day though. If you’re a regular reader of this blog you’ll know why. His words