Europe's Largest Social Health Network Invades U.S.
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
HealthUnlocked provides answers to health concerns and offers support to patients.
A new network available in the United States, known as ‘LinkedIn for health, ’ allows people with health concerns to get answers in one place as well as give and receive support from people with the similar health concerns.
According to a press release, HealthUnlocked was founded in London in 2010 by CEO Jorge Armanet and CMO Dr. Matt Jameson Evans. The health company claims to be one of the fastest growing startups in the U.K. health tech sector, growing exponentially since 2011 with three million site visits just last month. HealthUnlocked already provides National Health Service (NHS) Choices’ user-generated, interactive content via the communities section.
HealthUnlocked encourages individuals to go online and share experiences of health conditions, symptoms, treatments, and services. These are catalogued in an intelligent database, organized by communities, which signposts relevant content to people based on their profile. With more than 500 patient organizations and health support charities within the network, covering more than 750 health conditions globally, HealthUnlocked gives individuals information at their fingertips and the ability to connect with other people in similar situations. Before joining the platform, 70 percent of patients on HealthUnlocked had never spoken to another patient with the same condition before.
Armanet said, “We are delighted to be officially launching in the U.S. and are passionate about helping people connect with health organizations and individuals with the same medical concerns. We are expanding rapidly because there is huge global demand for better healthcare information and support. Our constant technology evolution and expansion to the U.S. are enabling us to connect people with relevant, personalized health information anytime, anywhere.”
According to Paul Nuki, Chief Editor at NHS Choices, “HealthUnlocked is a fantastic platform, offering many benefits to healthcare as a whole. We often refer NHS Choices users to HealthUnlocked forums, fully confident they will receive first class peer-to-peer advice. It’s all about expert patients sharing their knowledge and, in turn, creating a new generation of experts. HealthUnlocked creates real efficiencies for the health service as a whole because we know that better informed patients make better choices and achieve better outcomes.”
HealthUnlocked already has over 230,000 registered users and last month received three million site visits. This recent launch also was built with the mobile consumer in mind; 60 percent of people visit the site via their mobiles. HealthUnlocked has invested $1.7 million to ensure the platform is fully optimized and scalable for mobile device use and multilingual intelligence. The 10 U.S. health organizations joining HealthUnlocked.com. include the U.S. Armed Forces Foundation, Hepatitis Foundation International, and Patient Power Cancer Network.