HealthTap, a Global Health Practice providing 24/7 immediate access to doctors via video, text or voice has announced the launch of a new Smart Health Search feature. The latest feature will provide more tailored health information to users from the world’s largest library of doctor knowledge, through new proprietary algorithms.
HealthTap’s Smart Health Search algorithms take into account a variety of factors about the user including age, gender, comorbidities, pregnancy status, and other relevant indicators stored on the asker’s HealthTap personal health record (PHR) to match queries with answers, tips, and checklists provided by doctors to people similar to the user. Permission of the user is required and the answers are only available to the user, and to doctors and caregivers that the user explicitly authorized.
Now, the company’s enterprise customers (healthcare systems, hospitals, insurance companies, and large self-insured employers) will benefit from even more advanced personalization for their user populations through HealthTap’s operating system (known as HOPES).
These customers now receive individually tailored content from the company’s vast library that also incorporates pharmacy, lab, EMR, and engagement data to enhance search applicability and results.
Before today, searching for health information online was an impersonal experience. Who you were and your health background didn’t matter – you received the same general search results to your questions as the next person. However, most doctors would often begin their answers to health questions with the words “it depends,” since they didn’t know your personal history or the context of your question.
But this shouldn’t be. Dr. Geoffrey Rutledge, HealthTap’s Chief Medical Information Officer and double board certified doctor, who has been seeing patients physically and virtually for more than 36 years, explains: “On HealthTap, a 24-year-old woman will see different search results from the ones a 70-year-old man receives to a question like ‘should I take iron supplements,’ or when searching symptoms like ‘swollen ankles and weight gain.’ That’s because women may benefit from iron supplements when menstruating, and swollen ankles and weight gain may be symptoms of pregnancy.”
Over the past five years, HealthTap built the world’s largest online library of doctor-created or curated health content, and has served more than five billion answers and health tips in response to queries for health information. Combining HealthTap’s new enhanced search technology with the world’s most comprehensive health ontology – created with a network of more than 100,000 U.S. doctors – users can now leverage HOPES™, HealthTap’s proprietary Health Operating System, to combine data from a personal health record with a search query to receive more tailored, relevant, and helpful doctor insights from HealthTap’s library of health information.
