We are excited to launch our new Web site (pregnancy.wisertogether.com) in public beta. The site helps women and their families find quantitatively rigorous solutions to their pregnancy-related questions.
In today’s healthcare landscape, even low-risk pregnant women face a dizzying array of information and choices. On top of this, many pregnant women also face difficult decisions about various tests, conditions and treatments. So much information can be stressful, especially combined with a large number of available choices and lack of readily accessible expert guidance. Pregnant women and their families tend to turn to social networks and online discussion groups for assistance. But these sources tend to group together people with disparate experiences and backgrounds (different ages, socioeconomic backgrounds, medical or family situations), encouraging users to base decisions on information that may be unmatched to their circumstances.
At WiserTogether, we are dedicated to helping users make the best decision they can for their unique situation. We do this by connecting users to extensive data and research about what similar people did when faced with similar health decisions: the choices they made, their rationale, the outcome of those choices, and how they felt about it afterward.
Our pregnancy site presents data from thousands of women about the many choices they face while pregnant. Women start by choosing from a list of 43 (and growing) pregnancy-related issues, ranging from minor complaints like back pain and nausea to more medically complex issues such as epidurals and genetic testing. Data on these issues is collected and updated continuously, through user input and behind-the-scenes research. The site currently has more than 400,000 data points across 650-plus choices and offers in-depth analytics of experiences during pregnancies.
A New Model for Healthcare Decision-Making
We know that there is no shortage of web-based information about personal health, but WiserTogether offers something still quite new in the cyber landscape. We are among the first to provide quantified peer decision information on patient actions and outcomes, a feature that sets us apart from health and pregnancy information sites such as WebMD and BabyCenter. In addition, we are different from health-based social networks such as Patientslikeme, because our focus is on decision support rather than social support. Lastly, we differ from other decision support sites, such as Hunch, because rather than making recommendations for users, we offer personalized data and tools to help our users make their own decisions. Our users have consistently stated that WiserTogether’s approach gives them greater confidence about their decisions and peace of mind than competing information and decision support sites.
Our Commitment to You
Thanks to the news coverage, we are now getting large and growing numbers of users each day. And that brings us to our request – we need your input and observations on how we can use data to better help you with your decisions. We want to know how you would like us to support you. We want to know which decision tools you prefer and how our existing tools can be better. We want to know where you would like additional data, and your preferred modes and frequency of outreach. We want to know what we should be doing for you that we aren’t already doing in order to provide the best personalized help to you.
Our commitment to you is that we will listen, learn and work as hard as necessary to fix the things that need fixing and add the things that need adding. We want to make WiserTogether the tool you need to better understand your health options and make decisions confidently and in a way that gives you peace of mind. Our very accomplished team, as well as our advising health experts and decision support gurus believe that we have taken the first step in that direction. With your help and by working together we will get there.
- The WiserTogether Team
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