NeuroTalk Support Groups - Ever heard of Treato? It's heard of you.

I'm just paranoid. I guess.
www.treato.com

"That was exactly the problem confronting Gideon Mantel, the CEO and co-founder of First Life Research. His 17-year-old daughter had suffered a basketball injury and was facing knee surgery, medication or both. Mantel searched the web to learn as much as he could in order to ask the right questions of his daughter’s doctors. He spent days combing through posts on patient blogs and online bulletin boards.

And that led to Mantel’s light-bulb moment. The former CEO of Israeli high-tech heavyweight Commtouch was determined to create a service that would aggregate all that patient information in one place, categorized in an easy-to-understand format.

Four years in the making, with $5.5 million in venture capital financing, Treato was launched at the end of September at the Health 2.0 conference in San Francisco. First Life Research is betting that Treato will revolutionize the way patients, physicians, health maintenance organizations (HMOs) and pharmaceutical companies integrate user-generated data into their information processing.

In fact, Treato’s revenue is expected to come from partnerships with pharma, HMOs and drug-related research groups willing to pay for the data. First Life is in negotiations with half a dozen big players, with deals possible by the end of the year."
Sifting through roughly 10 billion patient discussions posted online — a number that grows by nearly 50 percent each year — and putting them into some sort of logical structure was Treato’s challenge.

To do so, the company had to develop its own natural language processing, a tricky task that took a few years. Someone writing in Texas may not use the same expressions as a patient in India to describe the same side effects, explains Haggai Levy, head of marketing communications.

“There are different writing styles, slang and misspellings,” he points out.

“If someone says they feel like their ‘head is going to explode,’ we have to understand that this is referring to a headache,” adds Michal Tamir, the company’s marketing and business development manager. Making sense of such similes in several billion messages requires a “machine,” as Levy

Once the data is categorized, it’s possible to analyze it and present significant statistics. An asthma medication may have some 700 reported side effects, but which are the most prevalent? And which side effects are most common when switching from one drug to another? Treato aims to conquer all of these tasks.

You can also search for medical conditions. The Treato site covers 13,000 conditions and 11,000 medications. Of the 10 billion patient discussions, Treato indexes just over 800 million of them from 23 million patients.

Tamir adds that clinical trials only look at one drug at a time rather than side effects that may occur when two medications are taken at once, something that Treato’s software can compare and correlate.

http://israel21c.org/blog/does-that-...will-tell-you/