My new medical research startup launches today: let me know what you think

Googling for "Hank Gardstein MD" finds only a Henry (for which Hank is a nickname) Gardstein (<a href="http://www.healthgrades.com/physician/dr-henry-gardstein-xcsg4" rel="nofollow">http://www.healthgrades.com/physician/dr-henry-gardstein-xcs...</a>) with the same school of medicine, medical specialty, and rough date of beginning of practice as that of the profile on MetaMed.<p>That doctor was disbarred (<a href="http://w3.health.state.ny.us/opmc/factions.nsf/cd901a6816701d94852568c0004e3fb7/3e643e0499ca9b7a8525747b0058f221/$FILE/lc108744.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://w3.health.state.ny.us/opmc/factions.nsf/cd901a6816701...</a>) for writing online pharmacy prescriptions.<p>Same guy?

Congrats on an audacious project!<p>Unfortunately, main site not working for me.<p>So, "at least two of our expert researchers will validate test results to rule out any errors"?<p>What does that mean, exactly? As a board certified pathologist, I have some idea what I mean by validation, but what do you mean?<p>Next, the featured testimonial from "Jerry W." sounds fishy - it may be genuine, but it seems like it was written by marketing, and lacks any detail to provide credibility to skeptical evaluators.<p>Next, when research is published, there is a p value, perhaps 0.04. When you provide your recommendations to patients, I'm sure you are smart enough to hedge appropriately. How do you communicate that? Do you guarantee follow-up if new research modifies the confidence of your previous recommendations?<p>Finally, research evaluating one treatment versus another typically are provided in the context of routine patient care for the average patient. Your clientele here, clearly, are not run of the mill patients. With the proposed fee structure, they are also not likely pursuing routine treatment. This suggests that routinely published research will be less applicable to your customers. This amounts to being a huge selection bias. How do you plan to adjust for this issue? (As a specific example for one class of these problems, for those not familiar with these kinds of issues: the reason we don't perform routine mammograms in women starting at age 20 is not just cost - the prevalence is so low in this age range that the false positive rate is very high. So, patients who obtain a mammogram at age 20 for "screening" are at higher risk of false positives.)

From Google Cache (was going to link to it, but the text-only version has a lot of over-laid text and is hard to read):<p>&#62; We work with you and your doctor to figure out how advances in medical science apply to your personal health needs. Our team of researchers will do in-depth, personalized analysis to find new technologies, read scientific journals, talk to experts, and separate real medical breakthroughs from media hype. Whether it’s testing, prevention, treatment, or nutrition, if you have medical questions, we can help inform you about what the options are and what a rushed, ten-minute appointment might have overlooked.<p>Pricing:<p>&#62; $5,000 (Surface); $25,000 (Depth); $250,000 (Comprehensive); $1,000,000 (Original Research)

So how these really work? Do you have experts in every sub-field of medicine lined up to analyse each case? Looking at your team, everyone seems to have title "Health Researcher" but most of them have no real degree in medicine or have any real experience with specific illness. Many seem to have experience and education that is not even remotely close to "health researcher" title let alone be legally licensed to prescribe anything to anyone medicine related in US. So how these people are supposed to read complex test reports, connect subtle dots and give me advice that is better than sub-sub-specialty practicing MD who sees 100s of patients day in day out? Website is full of PR quotes without any details of how it would stand up to claims it has been making.

Interesting idea, but I'm wondering about the iterative nature of some diagnosis and treatment. I'm specifically thinking about how my wife went through lots of trial and error with eliminating particular things from her diet to get a handle on what was making her feel so terrible.<p>The way I'm reading the site, it feels more like a one-shot "we'll run a bunch of tests and give you a single comprehensive analysis" which seems like a good idea in theory, but scares me in practice.

A rushed ten minute consult annoys us all, but How often is my medical condition going to be something that say paying the doctor to take 45 mins would not uncover.<p>Most of us have diseases that are horses not zebra - and you have a strong financial incentive to encourage hypochondriacs to keep hearing zebra.<p>If my condition has Gregory House stumped, sure ill pay you but otherwise that lump on your skin is a cyst not a tumour and that shortness of breath is lack of fitness not a heart failure.

This is the sort of service that a general practitioner should be providing.<p>The vast majority of patients have routine problems. Though these might be distressing to the individuals, the "standard of care" (assuming correct diagnosis) is established practice, and this service would not affect that.<p>For the few with very rare conditions, or with useless primary care physicians, this service might be useful, however the price is very high for what is essentially a diagnostic/referral service.<p>Nevertheless, I think it could be commercially successful, given the number of people who think they know more about medicine and medical practice than their doctors do.

For reference, make sure your site can handle real traffic before posting it to HN. Not doing so will hurt your brand and reduce chances of getting some good initial traction. More so with such type of service. My initial perception is that I cannot trust a business with my health when they can't even properly setup a website.

Whenever we run a test in medicine, we ask, "How would the result affect management?" If the result, one way or another, would not change management, the test is not worth running.<p>The site is down so I have to go from the headline, but I'd ask the same question: how would this service affect clinical management? Can you offer an example?

Excellent idea, great concept!!!<p>It's not everyday medicine where you work on simple problems following a statistical approach - an appendicitis is more likely than a Meckel diverticulum, and a simple overeating is even more likely than both.<p>But there are complicated cases - not very often, but that's the one I like, and that most of the passionated doctors do too. Hell - I <i>love</i> such cases.<p>A quick story - I once had the chance to make a one-in-a-million diagnosis while working in the ER of a small hospital, around 2004.<p>A patient presented with a psychiatric history and a psychiatric diagnosis, but somehow it didn't feel right. I had this odd feeling when talking to the patient - no psychiatric symptoms of no kind. It seemed wrong. I ordered basic blood tests (checking for hyponatremia, etc), X-rays - all normal.<p>It was a bit late so I asked for the patient to be served a lunch before being discharged, deeply unsatisfied. Around 10 minutes later, the patient had a new episode - but this time it was in an hospital and I did not have to rely on eyewitnesses - it looked a lot like neurological problem, not a psychiatric problem.<p>After another round of blood tests (I don't like it when I don't know what's happening), brain scan, etc. everything was normal. I noticed the glucose was normal - it should not be, since the patient had had an hospital lunch (in my hospital it included marmelade, and all kind of sweet things!)<p>So I ordered a test to check for insulinoma (I'm weird, I know - its incidence is like one-in-a-million) because it made sense - and the test was negative.<p>At this time, I was just a medical resident - the seniors were a bit mad at me for having spent so much time (and costly diagnostic procedures) on what was proven wrong, and what should be wrong in the first place - because it is so unfrequent. And that's not what one is expected to do in the ER (fortunately, it was late at night)<p>Yet I wasn't satisfied, so I asked the patient to be transferred in the university hospital neurological department for further tests. Something was happening, we didn't know what, someone had labelled the patient "crazy" (not politically correct, but truth is psychiatric patient issues are usually less investigated) but there <i>was</i> something.<p>Guess what- weeks later I got a letter, they found it was a rare variant of insulinoma that our basic test did not detect.<p>That's one of my best moment in life !! That day I made a difference - I removed a wrongful psychiatric diagnosis and gave the proper diagnosis. Patients with insulinoma should <i>not</i> get institutionalized in a psychiatric hospital.<p>That's the medicine I love. Fixing basic problems is the job a mechanic.<p>The kind of medicine I love is unfortunately not possible with the current healthcare setup - and even with usual patients, because most people don't care. They want a quick fix.<p>This startup idea is just great, to take care of people who want the real deal. I wish you luck!!<p>I'm sure you will find great clinicians who will take going as deep as the rabbit hole goes to give excellent care.

I like the idea in concept but have a couple critiques.<p>1) Pricing- even the most basic package is ridiculous. For $5000 I would not only fly to your city to spend as much time with you in a face-to-face meeting discussing your medical problems, but I would give you my personal cell phone number for any questions or concerns at a later date.<p>2) Chart reviews- I don't know the credentials of the people doing the reviews, but I am highly suspect of anyone other than a board certified physician in a given specialty providing medical advise or in any way guiding diagnostic decisions.<p>Having said that, I think there is real opportunity here. I wish you the best of luck.

Kevin,<p>It seems that the Singularity Institute also reads James Altucher: <a href="http://www.jamesaltucher.com/what-is-the-quickest-way-to-make-a-million/" rel="nofollow">http://www.jamesaltucher.com/what-is-the-quickest-way-to-mak...</a>.<p>My guess is that your "productize step" is to also use your researchers to train a specialized medical search engine you'll keep on the back-end (sort of a Mahalo+Watson).<p>If that isn't what you're doing, let me know. Maybe I can help get you there.

As a patient, I'd worry that the "at least two of our expert researchers will validate test results to rule out any errors" would get steered towards the less credentialed folks - the Eagle Scout philosophy major rather than the one or two MDs on the list of staff.<p>I'd have more comments, but the site appears to have gone for now...

Idea is great.<p>But I feel pricing model needs a revisit.<p>For patients with some serious ailments this is all fine but what about less serious issues like..a person with allergies, thyroid, migraine etc. These are kinds of things which bother people but still not enough to spend 5000 for analysis.<p>Probably a profile based pricing is a good idea? Just a thought.

You definitely need a better landing page. Plus your pricing page needs work. Since this is not a cheap service, I would test a version that did not post prices but encouraged inquiries.

I did a write-up for MetaMed for my site: <a href="http://bit.ly/YZb3G8/" rel="nofollow">http://bit.ly/YZb3G8/</a> Please share it if you can. If you know any journalists/bloggers that wish to interview MetaMed founding team, please let me or the person who posted this know.

The website (now loading) lists many health researchers on your team, but it doesn't say say much about their credentials and/or experience in biology/medicine. Can you give us some more details?

Great project and may I say great design. Looks very very solid IMHO.<p>Good luck.<p>As someone with a 1000 moles who have been diagnosed with melanoma (luckily early stage and now removed) would this service be of any good for me?

While your site is down, let me make one OT comment: I nearly had a heart attack when I saw that the username was 'rms'.<p>Unsurprisingly I suppose, you're not <i>that</i> rms.

Site's down. Perhaps you can put a teaser of what metamed is about in the comments so we have something to read/vote on while you get your site up again.

Interesting idea, but site is not really usable on mobile...

Can customers receive a print copy or is it only in PDF?

Not to be that guy, but on the Overview page for Patients &#38; Caregivers, in the picture with the two women, it says "treatment regime" - I believe it should be "treatment regimen".

MD here. The headline on your webpage: "For serious medical conditions, you need direct access to the <i>world’s best researchers</i>." [my emphasis added]<p>Pardon my skepticism, but that sentence and the rest of your not-functioning-very-well website smell of nothing more than an attempt to ripoff very vulnerable people, and other marketing bullshit.<p>But do please prove me wrong - kindly link to the world-class research your docs and researchers have done thus far.

I think it'd be nice if your site loaded.