From the November 2011 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


For now, safety is the first of the three areas the company had hoped to address, the others being efficacy and usability. For usability, the aim is to include, when more features roll out at some point over the next six to 12 months, physician reviews of products. But because of the known problems with user reviews -- people generally only comment if they really hate or really love something, and the difficulty in guaranteeing only physicians, and only physicians who have actually used the device, will comment -- Iluri said this feature will not be the primary draw of the site.

Efficacy, the third pillar, is also something the site hopes to address over the next year, possibly by using clinical trial aggregations or partnering with electronic medical record vendors, using information drawn from EMRs. If the EMR partnerships don't pan out over the next year, however, the company said it would look into getting commentary from thought leaders in the field.


But the company still has some growing to do. Iluri, who said she was the only full-time employee, now relies on about 20 contractors, but she plans to bring them in full-time once the next round of financing is complete.

As for revenue, she said they hope to make money off advertising and by generating partly customizable reports for providers or manufacturers, based on their data.

Iluri thinks her company has a shot, as she feels health care is where the car industry was before J.D. Power and Associates launched in the late 1960s.

"Automobiles were very unsafe, quality was pretty bad, until somebody shined a light and said, 'Hey, this car is better than that car, you might want to make your purchasing decisions about this.' And suddenly within a decade car safety and quality improved dramatically," she said.



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