Online reviews are every business’s nightmare and every consumer’s obsession. We rely on them as we scour restaurants on Yelp, search for power tools on Amazon, choose movies on Netflix, and shop for artisanal jewelry on Etsy.
But when it comes to prescription medication, too often, we take what our doctors give us, no questions asked. That’s a major problem, considering nearly 70 percent of Americans take prescription drugs, according to the Mayo Clinic. And it’s especially troubling because, as comedian John Oliver brilliantly conveyed in a recent episode of Last Week Tonight, in far too many cases, the doctors prescribing those drugs are on the payrolls of the very companies that sell them.
With a new product called RateRx, Ron Gutman, CEO of the digital health startup HealthTap, aims to take on this lack of transparency. RateRx will let doctors from all over the world rate the effectiveness of certain medications for certain ailments. They’ll also be able to leave comments about those drugs and rate other doctors’ answers. From that data, patients will be able to surface the best answers to make informed choices about the drugs they take.
“Healthcare is like a black box. We’re buying blind,” Gutman says. “But obviously there are opinions out there, and there are multiple medications to treat certain things. It’s good if we get informed about the state of the art in healthcare today.”
Quality through Quantity
RateRx is an extension of the work HealthTap is already doing to address the problem of the low-quality medical advice that runs rampant online. Its core business allows users to ask HealthTap’s network of 67,000 doctors (and counting) any medical question and get an answer for free any time of the day. After serving up 2.7 billion doctor answers since its founding in 2010, the HealthTap team realized that some of the most frequently asked questions were about prescription drugs, and they decided to develop a product that spoke directly to that strong interest.
HealthTap, of course, isn’t the only company that sees this lack of clarity as an opportunity. Iodine, a startup co-founded by former WIRED executive editor Thomas Goetz, crowdsources patient reviews, and presents them alongside clinical trial data and input from pharmacists. Another site, TheNNT.com, rates drugs based on the number of people who would need to take a drug in order for it to help one person — a statistical measure known as the “number needed to treat.” And Google has been working with the Mayo Clinic to create a database of information on commonly searched medical conditions, which includes lists of frequently used treatments for each.
Healthcare is like a black box. We’re buying blind. Ron Gutman
All of these efforts are valid attempts at sifting through the scary soup of health advice online, but Gutman has a compelling argument for why HealthTap’s approach makes the most sense. For starters, it’s not based on the average person’s reviews, which, as any Yelp user knows, can vary wildly from person to person. Instead, it’s based on an average of 63 doctor reviews per medication — reviews which have, themselves, been vetted by other doctors.
And because RateRx isn’t simply organizing content from other reputable sources, like the Mayo Clinic or the FDA, the information isn’t static. Reviews will naturally change as new research and drug development comes out. “The answer will always be dynamic,” he says. “These things evolve. This is the beauty of science.”
It’s too early to say which of these new platforms will become the most trusted source for this type of information. But one thing is certain: As more of these services sprout up, the power to dictate our health decisions is gradually being tugged from the grasp of big pharmaceutical companies, and placed in the hands of patients — where it rightly belongs.
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