Thank you so much for so incredibly quickly updating the ALS material. That is important and much appreciated.

Also, good for you for recruiting librarians—take note librarians and other information professionals. This is a marvelous opportunity to help shape a tool. I just love companies that are open to input and feedback from medical librarians that way. DeepWeb Technologies and its search engine Mednar is likewise open to input. I hope medical librarians will take advantage of these openings to influence the development of widely used tools like Mednar and OrganizedWisdom. Becoming a guide sounds like an ideal opportunity for an early career librarian to develop some real world experience in cataloging and consumer health and contribute to the betterment of information provision in health matters.

Thank you again, Unity.

We appreciate your review and feedback. Being a growing start-up the critiques, suggestions and criticisms that come from our users, other professionals and those who are active in the space are invaluable. They help us better understand what’s working, what needs improvement, and how we can keep improving to build a truly great service to help people get better health information.

I’m pleased to say that most of the issues you pointed out we have already been in the process of improving or are being addressed. In fact, this week, we are launching a much improved version of our WisdomCards that we think will improve some of the issues you raised in your post. We’d welcome your feedback once we launch the changes.

Additionally, one of the great things about being a human powered search service and having guides who are constantly updating our WisdomCards is that we can make improvements immediately. For example, we added ALS as a related topic on Motor Neuron Disease within minutes of seeing your blog post. Additionally, many users recommend great links and suggestions and the community help us make the WisdomCards better everyday.

We also were able to quickly check on the redirects through to ALS you mention, and here’s what we found: Lou Gehrig’s disease does in fact redirect to ALS, as does amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. If you search for “amyotrophic lateral sclerosis” you do indeed get the ALS WisdomCard, just as you will if you search for “Lou Gehrig’s disease.” That being said, we are working hard to simplify a few of the features that users have found confusing such as the “Try also” and some of the redirecting issues.

Finally, I’d like to mention that we love librarians and have found they often make the best guides which is why so many have contributed over the past 3 years. We are actively recruiting more librarians now to help us as Guides and as reviewers. We welcome all the help we can get from experts, patient advocates, search experts, researchers, and librarians. Anyone who is interested can apply on the Become a Guide link you mentioned. There is a thorough approval and training process with certification requirements from our physician team.

We’re very proud of our team and the work we are doing. We have a big mission and we are very passionate about doing great work. We recognize we have quite a bit of work to do, but with useful feedback, and a lot of hard work we will keep innovating and improving everyday.

Thanks again,

Unity Stoakes
Co-founder
OrganizedWisdom.com