The Importance of Sharing Care

Imagine your next visit to your doctor, whether it is for a routine check-up or to discuss a specific health condition.  We know that everyone involved, from doctors to nurses to pharmacists, will focus on how to provide you with precise care and the next steps to improve your health.

We’ve always been impressed by the commitment and care that healthcare provider’s exhibit day in and day out.

But then you leave the office.  And that’s when the issues emerge.

Patients need to learn more about what they just heard.  Since few of us have gone to medical school ourselves, we actually need time to read, absorb and process what it means.  And as we go online, we have to fight through another issue – the fact that approximately 85% of all healthcare blog posts are spam.   What and who can we trust to learn about our health?

Whether you are proactively managing your own health or visiting your physician, or taking care of someone else, you are likely to only have a handful of interactions with medical professionals each year.   Yet, our health is part of our daily life – it’s part of who we are and what we care deeply about — and, as a result, we think about how to improve it each and every day, ranging from whether we should eat a certain food to how we avoid cavities to stopping smoking to looking for a clinical trial for breast cancer.

What we do know is that in our search for the right information, the answer is not another website.  It is not a mobile app.  It is not a social media channel.  It is not more advertising.  It is not many things.

What we need is rather simple.

We need to empower the world’s experts to share the best information with you directly.

Working together, as one healthcare ecosystem, we will learn together every day of the year.  Physicians can learn from each other.  Healthcare providers can do the same.  And patients can know that they can depend on receiving the best available information, often directly from their physician, hospital or manufacturer of a brand, device or application.

When we all work together to “share care”, we create the ability to transform health.  When we combine our collective IQ, we can provide the most helpful content in the form of Q&As, images, videos, mobile apps and more.  We can provide you with many ways to learn and make it more efficient to do so.  We can provide content that you can trust.

Dr. Oz, who is the inspiring voice of Sharecare, provides the perfect example of what we will accomplish as a team.  He wants to help us transform our health, as individuals, today.  Not tomorrow, today.  And at the same time, Dr. Oz is pushing all of us to find new and better ways to improve our health via education, application and information for the long-term.  When we combine forces with healthcare providers and influencers who know a specific disease or condition inside and out, we have the right ingredients for success.

We’ll now be providing a new level of insight for our Sharecare partners so they can provide people – provide you — with the best possible information, applications and care online.  Called Sharecare Now, powered by WCG, partners will be able to identify the exact influencers, sources, language, content and syndication network to reach the people who will benefit the most, whether we are focusing on Anaheim or America.  It is an important step towards getting the right health and wellness content to the right people in real-time.

We hope you join us on this journey to partner and focus on how we can all become smarter about healthcare and more precise in how we share information and deliver the best possible care every day of the year.

Follow this link to see the official press release.

Jeff Arnold
Founder & Chief Architect/Sharecare

Bob Pearson
Chief Technology & Media Officer/WCG

File under: In the News