Direct-to-consumer virtual health company Ro launched a new health information platform dubbed Health Guide. 

Currently the platform covers sexual health, hair loss, weight management, diabetes, men’s health and allergies. However, a representative from the company said that in the future, the plan is to expand the offerings to not only cater to male users, and to include more conditions. 

The company, which got its start in the men’s sexual health space, said that the new service is designed to compete with the likes of WebMD and Google searches. 

“We created Health Guide to fulfill one of Roman’s guiding principles: to meet patients at eye level,” the Roman Health Guide team wrote on its welcome announcement. “We know the internet is already bursting with health-related content. But we also know that this material isn’t always complete, easy to understand, trustworthy, or fun to read. So we decided to do it better.”

Users can access medical articles that give users insight into causes, symptoms, diagnoses and treatment options. The site will also have a lifestyle health component, which gives readers articles about new health findings that can impact daily life. Lastly the site has an ‘Ask the Expert’ section where doctors answer frequently asked questions. Doctors and surgeons from NYU Langone Health and Maimoides Medical Center are part of the editorial team creating the content. 

The new editorial team is led by VICE alumni Grant Stoddard, whose his portfolio includes a variety of risqué men’s, sexual and cosmetic health stories. He has also been published in Men’s Health and the New York Magazine. 

WHY IT MATTERS

Patients are increasingly turning to the internet to find out more about their health. An October survey released by ResMed found that six out of 10 consumers use the internet to try to diagnose themselves — and that number is higher for millennials (76%). 

Additionally a new Aetna survey polling thousands of international office workers found that (43%) said they would investigate their condition online and then see a practitioner.

However, online medical advice has historically varied in reliability. 

THE LARGER TREND

Although Ro started out in men’s health, it has since launched Rory, a platform for women experiencing menopause. It has also expanded to smoking cessation with its platform Zero, which uses a prescription nicotine replacement therapy and behavioral app. The company is also particularly well funded. In 2018 it landed $85 million to work on Zero. 

It hasn’t been entirely smooth sailing for the company. Over the Summer Ro and its main competitor, Hims, which also works in in the online mail-order sexual health space, got heat when a New York Times article examined the company’s prescribing practices. The article points out that the clients come to the platforms with a “self-diagnosis” and don’t need to see a doctor in person.

Digital health has gone from an obscure term in the health tech world to buzz words on the lips of every hospital CEO in America. Today startups, hospitals and other stakeholders are working on systems to implement these evolving technologies in practice. 

“Obviously we’ve come a long way in digital health over the last decade or so,” Santosh Mohan, managing director of Brigham and Women’s iHub, told MobiHealthNews. “Digital health went from not being a thing at all, to being a little fragile thing in the early days. … Over the last 10 years we have come to have people in it, we’ve come to have pilots in it and we’ve come to have capital in it.” 

The iHub had an early focus on digital health. Founded in 2013, it serves as the Brigham’s innovation incubator. The team has a history of working with both health tech startups and hospital-grown tech initiatives. 

“It’s the early days for most folks, just like us,” Mohan said. “We at the Brigham are trying to deliver a structured approach with key elements of having the right mindset, the right toolset, the right skillset. [Those] are absolutely essential here.”

At HIMSS20, Mohan and his iHub colleague Dr. Mark Zhang, will be present the session "The Playbook for Getting Down and Dirty with Digital Health," which will provide audiences with tricks and tactics for implementing digital into the clinical arena. 

“I think the purpose of this presentation is to convey and share what we’ve learned [in] six-plus years of digital solutions at Brigham and Women’s. Also, just realizing that it is still early days and coming up with the processes. [We] have learned from mistakes in the past to get to a process that we think is working pretty well,” Zhang said. “At a high level, some of things we’ll be talking about include thinking about implementing digital health in a more systematic way, including a technical step to enable digital health, while also implementing processes and setting expectations and education around what it means to do digital health in an academic medical center and how to scope it for the result that the clinician or end users are hoping for.”

Unlike medication, there is no single straight path for implementing digital tools. Therefore, the pair plan to talk about setting up a structure to support innovation and implementation. 

“We are not measuring our success by the number of pitches that we listen to or the startups that we bring in to explore pilots. And we are not saying, ‘Oh look we got the operations to try new things so we are innovating.’ We don’t have that innovation theater mindset,” Mohan said.  

“We are being more strategic and going about it with a road map and a repeatable framework, building not just individual capabilities, but also portfolio capabilities so they can be leveraged to a broad initiative and strategic initiative.”

In addition to just creating the right avenues for implementation, the talk will also focus on bringing together a diverse team to work on these digital iniatives. Increasingly, hospitals and other health entities are starting tech incubation hubs, however, most of these teams have a modest number of staff on them. 

“We’re a fairly small team, and most innovation teams or teams focused on digital health … are fairly small in scope, and the task is a broad one,” Zhang said. “I think having a clarity of scope and a take is incredibly important. Our take this year is really about looking at the pulls within the system to focus on and ideally think about ways we can utilize these interventions in different ways. Like the concept of using every part of the buffalo. When we do something, we want it to be ideally reusable or have a pathway to be used in some other way.”

Santosh Mohan and Dr. Mark Zhang will be presenting "The Playbook for Getting Down and Dirty With Digital Health" at HIMSS20. It is scheduled for 10:00-11:00a.m on March 12 at the Orange Country Convention Center in room W304A.