Mixing meaning into disease research – Treato

I wasn’t so sure how to describe Treato. It’s really interesting – mixing semantic analysis, social media, medical records, and analysis – Treato is really the next level of how consumers research diseases.

The image to the right is one that came from searching for Lyme disease.

I am not sure how they assemble that graphic, but I guess it’s a mixture of curation (plainly telling the system the usual drugs) and seeing what folks report they took (by combing the web). [Aside: It seems to be just listing the most used drugs (and knowing how the disease is treated, it looks like that to me). I wonder if there’s enough data for them to actually rank the drugs based on favorable outcomes, too. Outcomes analytics is where my head is always at, these days.]

Treato says they identified “over 160,000 English language websites, containing user-generated-content about medications and symptoms.” And that they “have searched and mapped thousands of these sites and indexed over 1 billion posts, covering well over 11,000 drug brands.” And they “have organized and analyzed this vast amount of data to create statistically proven insights about every aspect of medication use” [from their About page.]

I am not sure if they do this, but I’d like to see Treato applying their engine to sites like Patients Like Me, or 23 and Me, where there is an even richer set of data connecting people, disease, and outcomes.

And I am not sure, but they say the throw in patient records from HMOs, which I guess must mean claims data (which one can buy). But it would be cool if they could also mine medical record notes as well. They have the tech to do it, it’s just a matter of pointing their analytics tools to a new source (hm, what about Practice Fusion?).

I’m always thinking of how to extract meaning from medical records. So, Treato blows my mind.

Do you know of any other consumer disease research tools as sophisticated as Treato?

Hm, I wonder if they have enough to model trends, `a la Google Flu Trends, and then predict out-breaks? And it would be cool if Treato published a Health of the Nation – sort of like a Google Zeitgeist – of what is searched for and trends in diseases. I don’t think I’ve seen anything like that. Perhaps the CDC has something like this? For sure Treato is sitting on meaningful data they could use for this report. What do you think?