New Healthline Symptom Search Dramatically Improves One of the Most Popular Online Health Research Activities, Marketwatch (Feb 13)
Healthline allows you to search according to symptoms you are experiencing. Build a symptom list and consider the possible causes.
"Symptom Search is the only Internet symptom tool to use a semantic medical taxonomy -- a relational database of over 1 million diseases, symptoms and their synonyms -- to analyze queries and produce ranked results. The latest extension of Healthline's Medically Guided Search(TM) platform, Symptom Search provides consumers with more relevant, accurate, and faster results than competing symptom research products."
From the press release:
-- GUIDED RESEARCH: The Symptom Search "type-ahead" feature allows users
to start with the general terms that are frequently top of mind and suggests additional terms to help quickly narrow their search for symptoms. For example, if a user begins to type in "c-o-u-g-h," they will not only see "cough," but a medically-reviewed list of 20 other types of coughs such as painful cough, hacking cough, night cough, and so on, to guide and refine the symptom search.
-- SEARCH ON RELATED SYMPTOMS: The Related Symptoms feature recognizes
user inputs, like "fever" and "muscle aches," and suggests symptoms that frequently occur in health articles mapped to these symptoms -- complete with definitions and illustrations.
-- COMPREHENSIVENESS: Symptom Search covers more than 3,500 symptoms and 900 diseases -- more than ten times the number of symptoms covered by WebMD, MayoClinic or any major consumer symptom research tool.
-- INTERACTIVE, SEARCH DRIVEN APPROACH: To offer the ability to explore
possible causes and learn as they go, Symptom Search allows consumers to
enter any combination of symptoms they choose. They can also quickly remove
a symptom or clear their Symptom List to start again. Other tools don't allow for the same experimentation and exploration; typically, symptom combinations are very limited, if they are available at all.
-- QUALITY/CONFIDENCE: In order to design the best search algorithms and
provide consumers with relevant, high quality results, Healthline analyzed raw data from multiple years of CDC surveys to rank the likelihood that a health condition would be detected. This is unique among both clinical and consumer symptom research resources.