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January 27, 2007
Idea du Jour: What's Going Around
Speaking as the parent of young kids, such people are pint-sized petri dishes, forever incubating and then bringing home all sorts of nasty viruses and bacteria. As a result, I spend an inordinate amount of time with pediatricians and talking to hospital sorts, almost always only to be told, "Oh, that [where "that" could be fever/diarrhea/strep/etc.] is going around right now."So, my question: Why isn't there some easier way of knowing what's going around right now? We have lots of hyper-local web-based services emerging, but there is no such thing for infectious disease. Sure, there are higher order sorts of services via the CDC and others for flu and the like, but I want something hyper-local for the sorts of things "going around" right now, and that is then seen by parents of the average toddler.
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Hmm ... *real* viral webites!
The serious problem is where to get the data.
Little value to parents, just another needless hysteria generator. Privacy concerns and the inherent conservatism of the medicos make it unlikely any way.
A better idea for all manner of rumors including contagions: a phone/email tree or maybe an online forum or a community blog for local parents in your kids' day care, school, etc. I see Venn diagrams.
It's this and other similar, fairly basic, needs that necessitate a well-designed health social network. In this case, I'd require disease info to be provided by doctors, not parents, for accuracy's sake.
A friend of mine from Cambridge (the original one in the UK) is a co-founder at a firm where their core business is in mobile network capacity planning for new and virtual operators. However through our discussions, it is patently clear that health applications of such a software are not to be under-estimated. I shall point him here and ask him to respond to your question directly. Thanks.
I like it... you could tier the site so that people could enter in their symptoms and Doctors could have another "map" or different control over the data.
My somewhat unrelated question is- when starting sites like this (which could probably be built for peanuts on elance) is there a company who will host it with scalable profit sharing support of the bandwidth such that if there was a spike in users it wouldn't go down or require you to buy infrastructure (nominal fee to host with profit sharing based on bandwidth or share of exit strategy) Like a VC web host...
Andi-life-get one
It seems that someone too cowardly to identify themselves is obsessing about my life. That's rich.
A good idea, and no doubt some Parent-based networking site could do well on this (i.e. location based with www.twitter.com - like functionality). Interesting to see what happens though when you give people the power of "health alerts" and "mobile phones"... This happened in China. http://www.unmediated.org/2007/01/pork_sales_down_1.html
this is a brilliant idea! everyone who is a parent (or a person who markets to parents) knows that the word-of-mouth is extremely powerful in this group.
i use the berkeley parents network quite a bit as a virtual word-of-mouth resource (my kids are 4 and 7) and i would certainly go in and click boxes that say "fever" "vomiting" "2 days" etc., if i could get current information what everyone else is dealing with too.
it wouldn't be my only decision point, but it would just help as a sanity check. if my kid had all the same symptoms of other parents but my kid was the only one who also had "sore throat", i might make the extra effort to take him in to the doctor.
good one!
How would this info be useful to parents? Most infectious diseases in children are spread from playing/interacting with other children and/or the school environment. I'm not sure how your precautions would change if you knew what bug it was.