Wish For It and There is ClinicaHealth

I have been helping Life With Cancer, a non-profit that supports cancer patients here in the Washington, D.C. area, to plan an enhanced Web presence that meets the needs of young adults, 18-39. I've been coaxing them to use the more or less free capabilities: blogger, wikis, social networking, groups. It's hard to convince the nurses that the free services are the best. It's counterintuitive to non-netizens.

There were some elements of LWC's concepts that were likely to need a costly custom environment - until I ran across ClinicaHealth. ClinicaHealth has designed a service, supported on an advertising model, that is targeted directly at organizations like Life With Cancer - support for patients and their families. The service provides both organizational and patient blogs, personal pages, and groups discussion threads. Organizations can customize the look and feel to match their existing logos and webpages. Security and control is perfect for this application, with user control of information sharing that is very complete. They've got all the legal framework built in - terms of use, privacy, etc.

And what sincere guys! While I can tell they want to make a real business out of this, there's a real element of community service behind it all. They're really excited about the benefit they can provide - since the founders both had a need for exactly this sort of service.

Life With Cancer's board had some understandable reservations about supporting patient blogs and pages. What if patients said derogatory or hurtful things about doctors or other patients? What if people gave each other bad medical advice? They didn't even think about scam artists selling quack medical treatments - which ClinicaHealth worried about. ClinicaHealth has thought this all through and has good answers for all these problems.