Healia is Here!

Several months ago, I wrote about Healia.com, a new and innovative search engine for all things to do with health.

This morning I got the news that I'd been waiting for from Carol Kirshner my Web Mistress (I'm still not sure that's a PC term for her) and researcher. Healia will be officially launched to the public tomorrow, September 18th.

As a writer on health, wellness and personal development, I think that this is going to become a major source of information for me. Much as I love Google, this is a search engine dedicated to these topics.

From a release that I've just received, Healia says that:
The newest version of Healia has several major improvements over our initial version:

• We have enhanced the accuracy and performance of our filtering algorithms
• We are offering additional filters to allow people to filter by the topic of the document when they submit a disease or drug-related search (Try searching on a disease and drug name to see how they are handled differently)
• We provide a “Suggested Result” from a reference site for disease and drug-related searches
• We detect and provide expanded equivalents to common medical abbreviations and acronyms

I've been putting it through its paces, and I must say that I'm very impressed. I'm probably a lot more demanding than most users, and it's very quick and accurate.

If you are a consumer or potential consumer, Healia will likely be the best place to research an illness. Or ways of keeping healthy.

I agree with the points in Carol's evaluation: It would be nice if search results opended in a separate window. Even though I use a laptop for everything (Macintosh, of course), and don't have much screen real estate, with Macintosh OS X, that's not a problem: navigating from one screen to another is a snap. Having to keep going back is a pain in the posterior.

And my cri du coeur: please, please, please could we have a Healia Search widget to add to our blogs??

I do everything that I can to provide my readers with totally accurate, up to date information, and I encourage them to check on everything. I'd love readers to be able to search directly from within medical blogs. It would be a real win/win, IMHO.

Wouldn't it be great to be able to demonstrate it at the Healthcare Blogging Summit in Washington in December???

Comments

[Healia]

Dr. Petty -- Thanks for the excellent feedback. We wanted to let everyone know that some Healia widgets and links are now available for bloggers to use off of the Healia.com homepage or at http://www.healia.com/healia/en/healia_tools.jsp?

Please let us know how else we can improve our service.

– The Healia Team

[Richard Petty]

Thank you SO much.

Within minutes of getting your message, Carol Kirshner had already installed the widget on my blog and a after a couple of hours of testing, I wrote an item about your widget and the other improvements:
http://richardgpettymd.blogs.com/my_weblog/2006/09/healia_i_thank_.html

This is all extremely helpful to professionals and the public alike, and a great way to launch your service.

All the best,

RP

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