Wade Sikkink, chief marketing officer of Collaborative Health Solutions. Photo by Andrea Ciurej.
When Dr. C. Layne Fontenot was an engineering manager for Intel Corporation, he had attracted an unknown illness that neither he nor his doctors were able to diagnose.
Fontenot kept getting the run-around from doctor’s office to the next in search of his medical condition.
In the meantime, he became sicker and sicker.
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“[He] became really sick to the point where he couldn’t work anymore,” said Wade Sikkink, who was a product manager at Intel at the time. “Nobody could figure out what was wrong with him.”
Fontenot then decided to set out to find a diagnosis for himself.
“[He] really struggled with the state of information on the Internet and the really fractured nature of where you find information, where you find other people, those kinds of things,” Sikkink said. “At that time, Facebook and those kinds of things were just beginning to exist.”
About three years later, Fontenot finally discovered his illness and instead of going back to Intel, a Fortune 500 company, he set off for even greater discoveries.
“He was going to start an enterprise to help solve this problem,” Sikkink said.
That’s when Fontenot founded Collaborative Health Solutions, an advanced and secure information-sharing platform that connects users with highly targeted medical information, along with Sikkink and a league of doctors, software developers and math geeks.
The company, headquartered in Austin, then launched a “fully Web 2.0” product called Medizzle. The site was named by Jorge Abullarade, chief operating officer, when he said the word “medizzle” while working with Fontenot at a Panera Bread.
“It’s a full suite of social networking tools for people that are suffering from health issues or chronic illness,” said Sikkink, CHS’ chief marketing officer who is stationed at the company’s Lincoln, Neb., location. “It’s a single-trusted platform where you could go to find other people who have similar or the same illness that you do and interact with those people and share information.”
Medizzle includes an Illness Knowledge Base, which is a medical database that includes more than 750 illnesses, their symptoms and risk factors, and a Differential Matching Engine, which is a propietary set of algorithms or computations that can match patients with others mathmatically “like” them.
“These algorithms don’t just do this matching, they also learn based on the quality of the matches and the interactions people make,” Sikkink said. “They get better over time.”
Medizzle is also a Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliant website, meaning that it’s encrypted with the latest version of Secure Socket Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) to keep all means of communication on the site secure.
Sikkink said that every page is Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS), which is evident in the Uniform Resource Locator (URL). This proves to users that the site is secure.
The greatest part about the site is that “you decide.”
“The more information you provide about yourself, the better the algorithms with match you with people like you,” Sikkink said. “When there’s 10,000 people on there, not only this person has the same illness as me, the same symptoms, the same presentations, but they have the same hereditary risk factors, they live in the same geography as I do, they are a male like I am, they are at my same age range and they have my same blood type.”
Anyone can use this free service, Sikkink said. All you have to do is register.
“We believe all people can benefit from sharing information with others,” he said. “It’s no different than finding a friend who has the same illness and talking about [it].”
Medizzle, however, is not by any means the final step in the diagnosis process.
“Use this as a tool for discussion with your doctor,” he said. “It’s by no means intended to replace the word of a physician.”
The site does have the ability to accelerate traditional medical knowledge discoveries, though.
“If you can come up with some new whiz bank treatment for some ailment and you can get that to the market in a safe, effective manner a year or more ahead of when it would otherwise be available, then everybody wins,” Sikkink said.
Sikkink feels that Medizzle also has the ability to eliminate the run-around from doctor to doctor like Fontenot had to experience.
“The collective wisdom of that group is going to be so much greater than either one person [or] any one member of the group,” Sikkink said. “The group itself is smarter than anyone in the group and so, by interacting and sharing information, it just gets you that much further along in the process.”
Quick Scoop
More on Medizzle
Website: medizzle.com
Founded: 2009 by C. Layne Fontenot, CEO of Collaborative Health Solutions
Functionalities: Algorithm matching tool to match patients with others of the same illness, symptoms and presentations. Connections feature for patients to tune into the latest groups and discussions on the site pertaining to a particular illness or symptom. Users can even create their own group or discussion. The testimonials features to share your thoughts about the site anonymously. A favorites feature allows users to star items of interest.
How to get started: Must register by creating a profile, including basic information such as gender, location and birth date, as well as a unique user name and e-mail.
Competitor: PatientsLikeMe
More on PatientsLikeMe
Website: patientslikeme.com
Founded: 2004 by MIT Engineers Ben Heywood, president, James Heywood, chairman, and Jeff Cole, chief technology officer
Story behind the company: Ben and James Heywood’s brother, Stephen, was diagnosed with Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or Lou Gehrig’s disease, which affects the nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord that control voluntary muscle movement. On the road to finding a cure and learning about their brother’s illness, the Heywoods, along with Cole, founded the privately funded company, PatientsLikeMe.
Functionalities: Users are able to join groups and discussions already made by the company.
How to get started:
- Start by completing a profile, including basic information such as age, location, treatments and symptoms.
- Learn about your Functional Rating Scale (FRS) outcomes. This is a graphical representation of your current health conditions, which will appear in your profile.
- Complete your symptom and treatment information, so you have the ability to record the progression of your condition and match with other patients of similar conditions.
As part of a content syndication partnership, you can also find the above article in this week’s (June 16-22) issue of Shout!, an alternative weekly newspaper in Omaha. Each Wednesday, look to Shout!’s Silicon Prairie News page for a feature story and “Quick Scoop.”
