It’s been awhile since my last blog post. I apologize, I’ve been busy. I’ve spent most of my time helping several startups get off the ground, some of which you’ll hear more about very soon. Among these, and the one I’ve spent the bulk of my energy on, is Medivizor. Over the next few weeks and months I’ll be sharing in this blog about the challenges that Medivizor is addressing, the challenges of starting a new company, and some of our experiences.

I’ll begin with a bit of the background. When thinking about what to do next, I had dozens of different ideas and opportunities to consider. In order to help me choose, I had set for myself criteria to evaluate the various opportunities. Two of the most important criteria were:

1. Whatever I do, it should inspire me and I must be passionate about it.
2. It had the potential to bring great benefit to the world (I realize it may sound pretentious, but it’s the truth).

The first, is obviously a mandatory criterion, and should be on every entrepreneur’s list – otherwise, it simply wouldn’t attract the attention and perseverance required to achieve it. I needed to firmly believe in the idea, the people, the value it would bring, the potential, and more. In any venture, there are many obstacles, ups, and downs – one must persevere to overcome them. If you don’t believe in the venture and aren’t passionate about it, those obstacles will soon become major barriers.

The second, however, is not on everybody’s list. I did not want to spend my time and energy on doing something that didn’t bring great benefit to people / the world. There were several ideas I ultimately rejected, even though they may have been lucrative. They could have helped some people or organizations, but ultimately, they wouldn’t leave the world in a better state than before. In fact, some even had a net negative impact. So these were rejected. I actually know of a few companies that are very successful, but the overall impact on the world due to their success is negative. I didn’t want to be involved in such efforts.

This quickly brought me to health – this is one area that has tremendous potential for the application of technology, in general, to software and the social web, in particular. In fact, the sky’s the limit. Everywhere I looked, things could be revolutionized or improved dramatically. We are really just at the tip of the iceberg in the application of technology in the area of health.

About Medivizor

So, a bit about Medivizor, which I’ll say much more about later (and you can read more on the web site, www.medivizor.com): Medivizor’s vision is to improve the lives of  people with serious medical conditions and those who care for them and to effectively apply software and the social web in the field of health for the betterment of humanity. This might sound a lofty goal, and indeed, it is. We want to change the world for the better!

You may wonder, how are we going to do that? Well, we’re beginning by tackling an important aspect of this: Personalized information updates for people suffering from chronic or serious medical conditions, or those who care for them.

Nowadays, if someone becomes seriously sick (with a chronic, life threatening, or quality of life threatening disease), more often than not, someone becomes a web researcher for any and all information about the medical condition – anything that might help. Sometimes it’s the person that’s sick, but often it’s their parents or another close family member or close friend. However, that process is far from effective or efficient. Quickly, they become inundated with too much information. Most of the information they actually get to, is not relevant for their specific condition. The information is written for scientists and medical professionals, and is very difficult to understand for most people – even well educated smart individuals. They find it difficult to know what to trust and what not to trust. How to interpret the information, which may even be conflicting. Much of the really promising and cutting edge research is published behind “pay walls”. Indeed, the most frustrating experience is when they develop a glimmer of hope that the new information in a research paper they read looks promising. So, they take it to their specialist and the doctor tells them it isn’t relevant because of some minute detail they couldn’t understand from the paper or about their condition.

Medivizor aims to solve all that. I’ll tell you more about how, soon. In the meantime, if you know of someone with a serious medical condition that may benefit from Medivizor, invite them to sign up (for free) to be in our early access program which begins next week (by invitation only).

Until we set up a blog at Medivizor.com, I’ll continue to write here.

As always, your thoughts, comments, and feedback are greatly appreciated!