Check out these articles about health images:
Charlie Silvr of RealAge
Image by Esthr
part of my personal health info series.... (I just finished writing a Release 1.0 on the topic, and will be running a workshop on it Septembr 30.)
RealAge is a model – unfortunately a rare one – of effective personalized outreach to consumers about health care. RealAge.com is an online service accessible through a consumer website that interacts directly with individuals, stores their histories for them only, and uses their self-reported data to figure out their RealAge. “We’re a media company,” says founder Charlie Silver, a serial entrepreneur who sold his chain of quick-oil-change centers to Jiffy Lube in 1994. Now he’s in the preventive maintenance business again - for human beings. RealAge is not an outgrowth of, say, a disabled child or a mourned spouse, but of Silver’s perception that people needed a simple way not just to collect or store health data, but to understand the meaning of it.
That perception didn’t come easy. The company began in 1994, when Silver’s previous business partner, Marty Rom, introduced him to Michael Roizen, MD. Rom and Roizen had met in medical school; in 1994, Roizen was developing medical informatics programs at the University of Chicago. Rom and Roizen recruited Silver to help start a business using interactive tools to collect personal health information. The product was basically a dumbed-down PC with five buttons that doctors could put in front of patients to take their medical histories.
But in hindsight, Silver realizes, the founders got it wrong. The challenge isn’t taking the patient’s history, but rather representing it electronically for easy analysis and making it meaningful to the individual. Most health information is hard to summarize even for a doctor – though it’s easy enough to see and say “You look terrible,” or “You’re looking great.” But exactly how terrible or how great? The numbers people focus on, from cholesterol level and weight to blood pressure and pulse rate, are all too discrete. No one of them tells the overall tale of an individual’s overall health. There’s a complex skein of conditions and dependencies and hedges. In other words, it’s hard to keep motivated to stay healthy when there’s no way to measure the impact.
By contrast, there’s a person’s RealAge, which does change when you change your behavior. based on actuarial analysis of numerous studies and health statistics, and an ever-expanding array of epidemiological survey results and clinical trials. “It needed a single number,” says Silver. “In sports, in business, in school…we measure things with a single number” - even though it hides lots of complexities. With such a number, an individual can use variety of strategies to lower her RealAge, just as a business may use any number of strategies to raise its profitability.
To be sure, there is lots of specific advice and complex background information that RealAge uses to supplement the RealAge (and keep users coming back), depending on each user’s (self-reported) conditions, behavior and prospects. But there is also a bottom line: Your RealAge is 44.5, even though you were born in 1965. Or, congratulations! Your RealAge has dropped two years since you stopped smoking, started walking to work and, oh yes, quit that job you hate and lowered your stress.
Constant comments
For example, registered users received the following tip a week after a journal article casting doubts on Vitamin E appeared: “You've no doubt noted articles like ‘Vitamin E Linked to Higher Death Rates’ [with a summary]. [It] may have you wondering if you should change your own health habits based on this news. However, according to a health alert, “Is Vitamin E Bad for You?” published in RealAge Magazine, RealAge’s premium subscription service, you shouldn’t give up on it, especially if you are a relatively young, healthy adult. Just don't take too much. The RealAge Optimum dose of vitamin E is 400 IU per day. Use this as your upper intake limit. Also, if you take supplements, avoid being a solo supplement taker. Treat supplements the same way you treat your diet and go for balance.”
By contrast, says Roizen, “With all the new information about hormone replacement therapy, we waited for the dust to settle - about three months – and then we tried to summarize the pros and cons.” As for Vioxx, he adds, “In the database we have everyone who says they are taking Vioxx, so we sent them all a message when it was withdrawn. One of the real values of e-mail is that you can get a lot more information out than in a 30-second TV slot.”
In reality, the mailings can sometimes be undercustomized. The studies that RealAge cites sometimes contradict one another. Of course, that’s a function of real life, not just RealAge. Many of them do in fact contradict each other. RealAge’s basic messages, however, are the ones that the medical establishment seems to have the toughest time getting through: Eat right, don’t smoke, exercise, check for the most common diseases. Just getting those messages acted upon would save more lives than any drug invented so far.
While doctors may sniff at RealAge’s commercial aspects and its obsession with vitamins, we’d wager that it has been far more effective in changing people’s behavior than most doctors. It’s not that doctors don’t care; it’s that they aren’t there. RealAge is there seven days a week with its e-mailed tip- of- the- day, reaching 4 million people a day.
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Image by CR Artist
These are two of my favorite magazines! Both are full of so many good articles and information. I love to learn about health because I have a desire to live my life as healthy and fit as possible and I want to help others do that as well. To know health and abundance.
