San Francisco 2010: Launch of ShareCare

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October 18, 2022 - By Bianca Grogan

Jeff Arnold launched ShareCare at Health 2.0 Fall Conference in San Francisco, Ca, on October 7-8, 2010. ShareCare recruits industry experts to answer health and wellness questions, so they can provide consumers with the necessary tools to make smart health choices and live healthier lives. Some of the reasons way this service is so different is because it simplifies the search for health information, allows consumers to find high quality answers from multiple points of view, and drives healthcare to the local level by allowing consumers to hear from physicians close to home. With partners such as Sony, Harpo (Oprah’s production company), Discovery, Dr. Mehmet Oz, and multiple major content providers, the launch of ShareCare has been highly anticipated.

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9 Responses to San Francisco 2010: Launch of ShareCare

EPatientDave says:

1 year ago

From the Participatory Medicine standpoint, there seems to be a huge hole in the ShareCare model: where's the voice of the patients? Are our experiences and observations irrelevant? Where is the vetting by people with real world experience?
I'm all in favor of expert advice, but it's got to be reliable, and as far as I know, no single category of advisor is reliable (including patients, and including "experts").
I'm no doctor - I only have an inkling about one subject - my own disease, stage IV renal cell carcinoma - and one treatment, HDIL-2. Their content on this subject is crap: total, feeble, incomplete, out of date crap.
And is there any way to comment? Not that I can see. Strikes me as a dangerously broken model for assessing quality of content - anything but "expert."
BUT, maybe I'm missing something - can someone prove me wrong?

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Dianne says:

1 year ago

It also appears that pharma marketers are going to be paying quite a bit to sponsor the site, according to this New York Times article. http://snurl.com/1bliud [www_nytimes_com]

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bev M.D. says:

1 year ago

Dave's question raises another one: how does ShareCare know who is an "expert" in a given field, or is this self-reported?

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EPatientDave says:

1 year ago

fwiw, I don't care who sponsors a site if the info is what patients frickin' NEED in their hour of crisis.
But to hang out a single "Git yer red hot experts here" without being responsible for whether said experts are actually reliable… hm.
I'm also puzzled by the claim that they make it much easier to find what you need. Searching for <a href="http://www.sharecare.com/search?query=stage+iv+kidney+cancer+treatments" rel="nofollow">"stage IV kidney cancer treatments" lists lots of other Stage IV cancers, but doesn't find what "stage 4…" does. Etc.
The corker for me was the "expert" advice (from Johns Hopkins no less) that immunotherapy for kidney cancer (the treatment I got) is described as "has been shown to have activity, but the effect has been very modest." Right: at a specialist center like Beth Israel Deaconess 25% of patients respond, and half have a complete response (i.e. are essentially cured) in three months. Mild.
Now let's see how long it takes them to update the info. I'm writing this at 7 ET on 10/20/2010.

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Dianne says:

1 year ago

Just found the questionnaire on the ShareCare site you have to fill out before being judged an "expert" - http://www.sharecare.com/auth/register
According to the form "Please note that to apply to be an expert you must be a healthcare professional and/or a published health and wellness author." That covers quite a lot of ground considering you don't really need much in the way of qualifications to become "a published health and wellness author" in my opinion.

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EPatientDave says:

1 year ago

Thanks for finding that, Dianne. I'm glad they're not restricting it to degreed people, as Medpedia does. (Clearly, as my kidney cancer example shows, that's no inherent guarantee.) But I do wonder how they vet applicants - and I wonder if they go back and check the expert's advice.

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Tadalis says:

1 year ago

ShareCare recruits industry experts to answer health and wellness questions, so they can provide consumers with the necessary tools to make smart.

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Amit Rivonkar says:

1 year ago

hi,
very informative blog. even i have a health blog: http://www.freehealthadvice.blog.com

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Online Healthcare Tr says:

1 year ago

This sounds like a really great idea for people to get instant feedback on health care decisions. It's important for people to remember though that doctors will always know best and to not use this to try and self diagnose themselves.

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