I can fairly confidently say that I have never thought -- and I am almost never likely to think -- "Hey, you know what I need? A social network that tells all my friends when I get a colonoscopy."
The premise of Prime is that the network would be a much smaller subset than, say, your Facebook friends. I know that's been said before and perhaps left by the wayside, but we really think it will hold true in this case (that your Prime friends will be family members and dearest friends). Looks like we need to communicate that, and the fact that every share is opt-in, more clearly.
There's a very interesting problem in this space we're about to all be hit by, right?
Most all of the healthcare problems we have could be solved/made better/made less expensive by massive data mining (disclaimer: I work in a related area nowadays). The problem is, to be most useful, that data has to be both complete and correlated with other such data points.
That pretty much destroys privacy as we know it, at least until we find some way of updating our societal mores to be less discriminatory.
Example: How great would it be to have automated notification of STD/STI risks (Siri suggests: wear a rubber if they take you home tonight, no reason)? How about having a simple way of being warned when cold season is actually happening in your area (some threshold of people in your vicinity are currently seeing a doc about a rhinovirus case, so be careful)?
Even more concretely: we can't optimize the hospital services because all that data is silo'ed and fragmented so badly. Your medical history is always incomplete.
There is a lot of negative commentary on this thread (thanks HN for always providing such valuable feedback), but I'd like to point out what I think is useful and positive with Prime.
First, health is inherently social. When you're sick, do you tell your loved one (boy/girlfriend, spouse, parent, close friends, etc?). Of course you do. You want them to know that you might need their care for a few days, that you might have to miss some events that you'd planned together, that you might need help going to the pharmacy to pick up some meds, etc. More serious health issues are even more social. Name one person you know who has suffered from a severe medical condition who has not told their loved ones. When my close family and friends are ill or going in for checkups that are potentially not routine, I want to know immediately what happened. If my loved one were to be drastically ill, I would want to know everything about their condition, the test results, the doctors' reports, the latest research, etc. Surely the HN community understands the desire to geek out over knowledge (health knowledge) and Prime aids that.
Furthermore, I recently suffered some major personal health issues. When I was in the midst of a flurry of doctors visits and medical procedures, my family and friends were all very curious to know what was happening and if they could help out, etc. I was already exhausted by the doctors' visits, and sharing the result of every test and exam with dozens of people was really straining for me. I was extremely lucky to have people near me who could assist me in spreading the word to the people who cared, but this whole "sharing information" problem would have been perfectly solved with Prime. I intentionally did not share any of my health information on Facebook, because I didn't trust Facebook's data privacy and sharing policies. While health is social, it's still private. But Prime may solve this.
For more routine procedures, I can see Prime being very useful. Did my elderly grandmother get her flu shot yet? Check. What was the result of my father's latest checkup about his cholesterol level? Easy to know.
Beyond "social", Prime provides centralized repo for all your medical data. Remember Mint? Remember how everyone gave up their bank passwords to a web-based service so they could see pretty charts and better budget and manage their finances? Remember how Mint took that information and sold ads and upsells against it? Yeah. Right. That's what is happening with medical data, too. Someone (Prime, perhaps) is going to be the one to collect all this information in one place, make it easy to read and understand, and become "the Mint of health data". I would bet on this. The world of health data is too fragmented to not be consolidated sometime soon.
The issues Prime faces are not small: first, ingesting data, and second, earning their users' trust.
"Name one person you know who has suffered from a severe medical condition who has not told their loved ones."
Any number of friends or random acquaintances who are seeking professional help for psychological reasons, or for cancer, or for something seen as embarrassing ("Hey Mom, I've been pissing blood due to a UTI--turns out you were right not to like her...").
"The world of health data is too fragmented to not be consolidated sometime soon."
Which is fucking scary...the ways that this can go wrong, especially given how ruthless and amoral and short-sighted your average startup is these days, are legion. I'd rather see a model similar to safety deposit boxes with revocable keys than the doubtless ad-driven pharma-sponsored nightmare that's probably being concocted in the Valley as we speak by some MBAs too stupid to know any better.
"When you're sick, do you tell your loved one (boy/girlfriend, spouse, parent, close friends, etc?). Of course you do."
This is __highly__ subjective. I don't do this.
But neither your comment nor mine proves anything.
I have a feeling they're coming from the premise that pre-Facebook no one wanted to share what they're doing, filtered pictures of what they're eating, etc. The world evolves. As someone else has mentioned, maybe they're ahead of their time. Then again, maybe not. The only thing they're getting flak on here is the social part of the product. I'm unwilling to believe they just did that for a "Web 2.0" badge.
However, it'll be interesting to know how they figured health is inherently social.
Psychological illnesses, cancer, etc may be too sensitive to share. Even pregnancy for that matter.
Fever, stomach aches, head aches may be noise - I know people who just trudge along their day without a second thought. But this is anecdotal.
I do think they're building something cool here and wish them the best of luck!
Thanks, right on! (Regarding our viewpoint on timing.)
You're also right that it's subjective but it seems that at some point everyone comes to share or hear about health info and we are working to improve the communication difficulties in that realm.
Name one person you know who has suffered from a severe medical condition who has not told their loved ones.
Outside of people involved in the medical treatment (who would be prohibited from naming them by HIPAA), the fact that they haven't told their loved ones would mean that other people wouldn't really be able to name them, generally.
>First, health is inherently social. When you're sick, do you tell your loved one (boy/girlfriend, spouse, parent, close friends, etc?)
What is happening is that you are using the term "social" in a literal way, whereas in this context (the tech industry) it means something very specific.
I agree that the word "Social" is loaded -- the tech industry has contorted its meaning and I did (yes) take the word in a more literal/historical sense. Prime might be wise to rethink the branding. Maybe "social" is the wrong word, even if its the right concept.
Comments
"Health is inherently social."
No. It's not.
http://stayinyourprime.com/img/screens/primeLaunch.png is a particularly hilarious example of what's wrong with that concept that health is social.
I can fairly confidently say that I have never thought -- and I am almost never likely to think -- "Hey, you know what I need? A social network that tells all my friends when I get a colonoscopy."
The premise of Prime is that the network would be a much smaller subset than, say, your Facebook friends. I know that's been said before and perhaps left by the wayside, but we really think it will hold true in this case (that your Prime friends will be family members and dearest friends). Looks like we need to communicate that, and the fact that every share is opt-in, more clearly.
Yeah, kind of winced when I read that.
There's a very interesting problem in this space we're about to all be hit by, right?
Most all of the healthcare problems we have could be solved/made better/made less expensive by massive data mining (disclaimer: I work in a related area nowadays). The problem is, to be most useful, that data has to be both complete and correlated with other such data points.
That pretty much destroys privacy as we know it, at least until we find some way of updating our societal mores to be less discriminatory.
Example: How great would it be to have automated notification of STD/STI risks (Siri suggests: wear a rubber if they take you home tonight, no reason)? How about having a simple way of being warned when cold season is actually happening in your area (some threshold of people in your vicinity are currently seeing a doc about a rhinovirus case, so be careful)?
Even more concretely: we can't optimize the hospital services because all that data is silo'ed and fragmented so badly. Your medical history is always incomplete.
There is a lot of negative commentary on this thread (thanks HN for always providing such valuable feedback), but I'd like to point out what I think is useful and positive with Prime.
First, health is inherently social. When you're sick, do you tell your loved one (boy/girlfriend, spouse, parent, close friends, etc?). Of course you do. You want them to know that you might need their care for a few days, that you might have to miss some events that you'd planned together, that you might need help going to the pharmacy to pick up some meds, etc. More serious health issues are even more social. Name one person you know who has suffered from a severe medical condition who has not told their loved ones. When my close family and friends are ill or going in for checkups that are potentially not routine, I want to know immediately what happened. If my loved one were to be drastically ill, I would want to know everything about their condition, the test results, the doctors' reports, the latest research, etc. Surely the HN community understands the desire to geek out over knowledge (health knowledge) and Prime aids that.
Furthermore, I recently suffered some major personal health issues. When I was in the midst of a flurry of doctors visits and medical procedures, my family and friends were all very curious to know what was happening and if they could help out, etc. I was already exhausted by the doctors' visits, and sharing the result of every test and exam with dozens of people was really straining for me. I was extremely lucky to have people near me who could assist me in spreading the word to the people who cared, but this whole "sharing information" problem would have been perfectly solved with Prime. I intentionally did not share any of my health information on Facebook, because I didn't trust Facebook's data privacy and sharing policies. While health is social, it's still private. But Prime may solve this.
For more routine procedures, I can see Prime being very useful. Did my elderly grandmother get her flu shot yet? Check. What was the result of my father's latest checkup about his cholesterol level? Easy to know.
Beyond "social", Prime provides centralized repo for all your medical data. Remember Mint? Remember how everyone gave up their bank passwords to a web-based service so they could see pretty charts and better budget and manage their finances? Remember how Mint took that information and sold ads and upsells against it? Yeah. Right. That's what is happening with medical data, too. Someone (Prime, perhaps) is going to be the one to collect all this information in one place, make it easy to read and understand, and become "the Mint of health data". I would bet on this. The world of health data is too fragmented to not be consolidated sometime soon.
The issues Prime faces are not small: first, ingesting data, and second, earning their users' trust.
I wish them the best of luck.
"Name one person you know who has suffered from a severe medical condition who has not told their loved ones."
Any number of friends or random acquaintances who are seeking professional help for psychological reasons, or for cancer, or for something seen as embarrassing ("Hey Mom, I've been pissing blood due to a UTI--turns out you were right not to like her...").
"The world of health data is too fragmented to not be consolidated sometime soon."
Which is fucking scary...the ways that this can go wrong, especially given how ruthless and amoral and short-sighted your average startup is these days, are legion. I'd rather see a model similar to safety deposit boxes with revocable keys than the doubtless ad-driven pharma-sponsored nightmare that's probably being concocted in the Valley as we speak by some MBAs too stupid to know any better.
"When you're sick, do you tell your loved one (boy/girlfriend, spouse, parent, close friends, etc?). Of course you do."
This is __highly__ subjective. I don't do this. But neither your comment nor mine proves anything.
I have a feeling they're coming from the premise that pre-Facebook no one wanted to share what they're doing, filtered pictures of what they're eating, etc. The world evolves. As someone else has mentioned, maybe they're ahead of their time. Then again, maybe not. The only thing they're getting flak on here is the social part of the product. I'm unwilling to believe they just did that for a "Web 2.0" badge. However, it'll be interesting to know how they figured health is inherently social.
Psychological illnesses, cancer, etc may be too sensitive to share. Even pregnancy for that matter. Fever, stomach aches, head aches may be noise - I know people who just trudge along their day without a second thought. But this is anecdotal.
I do think they're building something cool here and wish them the best of luck!
Thanks, right on! (Regarding our viewpoint on timing.)
You're also right that it's subjective but it seems that at some point everyone comes to share or hear about health info and we are working to improve the communication difficulties in that realm.
Outside of people involved in the medical treatment (who would be prohibited from naming them by HIPAA), the fact that they haven't told their loved ones would mean that other people wouldn't really be able to name them, generally.
That doesn't mean they don't exist.
What is happening is that you are using the term "social" in a literal way, whereas in this context (the tech industry) it means something very specific.
I agree that the word "Social" is loaded -- the tech industry has contorted its meaning and I did (yes) take the word in a more literal/historical sense. Prime might be wise to rethink the branding. Maybe "social" is the wrong word, even if its the right concept.