WHCC PatientsLikeMe doesn’t like mobile

Tuesday - April 14th, 2009 - 02:03pm EST by Brian Dolan

During a panel discussion here at the World Health Care Congress in Washington D.C., PatientsLikeMe Co-Founder, President and Director Benjamin Heywood briefly described his social networking site’s growing popularity and aims. Heywood also noted that he’s still fascinated that PatientsLikeMe is thrown into the Health 2.0 bucket even though most users of his site are not young “technorati” but those with diseases that typically skew older, like Parkinson’s and ALS. Patients have been drawn to the site, Heywood said, because they cannot get the information they need from other sources. The information vacuum for these patients is remarkable, he said.

During the Q&A period I asked Heywood what his mobile strategy for accessing PatientsLikeMe was. While some mood-related applications may see some mobile related innovations with text messaging, on the whole, Heywood said his users aren’t interested in the mobile platform.

“We are not doing anything directly in mobile right now,” Heywood said. “We have something in our mood community, called InstaMood, which is a very quick thing that we do over email, sort of a ‘How are you right now?’ that layers on top of a very detailed patient-reported mood map that they edit via the Web. We definitely will move that to SMS very quickly and that will be applicable to other diseases; you can imagine that for epilepsy or other things.”

“As I said before, we’re not really a ‘technorati’ platform, so it’s not like our patients are clamoring for an iPhone app,” Heywood said. “These are people dealing with fundamentally life-changing illnesses. It’s not like oh fun let’s play with this. While there is immense value in that platform and obviously the whole world is going to be moving to mobile platforms eventually, we don’t feel the need to be a leader in that space.”

When asked, Heywood also weighed in on the potential of PatientsLikeMe to interface with PHRs like Google Health or Microsoft HealthVault.

“The answer is similar to the one I gave about mobile,” Heywood said. “We have no inclination to be a leader in interfacing with personal health records (PHRs) like Google Health. Many of our users do not uses PHRs…. For more on that, read the recent Boston Globe article on ePatientDave’s blog post about pulling his medical history… into Google Health. It’s a good read.”



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