Worried about illness? Web sites have the Rx
Two new Web sites just made health care for family members and yourself a little easier. One keeps track of care for loved ones, the other tracks the latest illnesses bugging folks.
Mark Willaman created www.shirleyboard.com so he could provide long-distance care for his mother Shirley, who has Alzheimer's disease. An owner of a Santa Cruz, Calif., software company, Willaman created a central Web site to store information about his mother's medical care in New Jersey for himself and for family members. Last year, Willaman decided to make www.shirleyboard.com available to the public.
"I needed to find a better way to communicate with family members and health care workers. I built this site for just myself and our family and then realized that others would benefit from this, too," explained Willaman. "I wanted a way to share information in an efficient manner, not just rely on phone calls."
The free site allows caregivers to centrally store important information, keep logs of daily activities for family and friends to view, and network with other caregivers for support and inspiration. Free of advertising and entirely private, the site lets caregivers create pages and make them accessible to individuals they designate. The site can also automatically send updates to family members or caregivers.
Some of the tools include an online journal to keep a record of care-giving activities; a section dubbed "the toolbox" records prescription information, including dose sizes and when medications were initiated or ended. Another section stores documents to upload, such as wills or power of attorney forms.
There is also a place to share photos, and a section to search for information or to ask questions or share tips and stories.
"This is really more than a central repository for facts," Willaman said. "Not only does the site help people communicate with one another, thereby improving care, but there is also a hidden benefit in that it provides a care-giving history, a memoir of sorts."
If misery loves company, then check out www.whoissick.org. A free sickness-tracking tool, entirely user-generated, the site reports the current germ of the month. Visitors to the site can discover that an 89-year-old woman near Northfield came down with a bad case of the flu in April, or a 2-year-old in Elk Grove Village boy was miserable last week, his parents reporting a runny nose, sneezing, cough, sore throat, fever and chills. Back in February there was a 45-year-old man near Wayne with a deep chest cough with phlegm, but no sore throat; and a 42-year-old near Lincolnshire with a runny, stuffy nose.
You don't care? Well, there are plenty who do. About 20,000 people per month log on to report symptoms and nearly 250,000 have reported symptoms around the world since the site was initiated a year ago.
When three different radio programs in Australia reported on the Web site, so many Australians logged on that it brought down the site because of too much traffic.
It all started with a stomachache. Site founder P.T. Lee's wife came down with severe stomach pains while on vacation. After a middle-of-the-night, four-hour wait in the ER and a brief four-minute visit with a physician, they were told she most likely had the stomach flu that happened to be going around.
"I couldn't help thinking, 'If only there were a Web site that had current and local sickness information, maybe we could have avoided the long wait," Lee said.
A couple of months later, Who Is Sick was born. Public health experts aren't sure how useful the site is at this point, but some call it "grassroots epidemiology," saying the more users it generates, the more useful it may become. Eventually, it may allow professionals and laymen alike to track epidemics or even food poisoning.
Feeling sick and want to share your symptoms … online and anonymously, not face-to-face, of course. Go to the site and enter your zip code. A Google map dotted with colorful icons will pop up indicating what symptoms are currently plaguing folks in your area. You can anonymously post your symptoms, such as a runny nose, body aches, fever, dizziness, chicken pox, food poisoning, mouth sores, red eyes or eye discharge, and more. A segmented pie chart reflects symptoms in different colors.
The site provides data, not diagnoses and Lee wants site users to know that this shouldn't be used as a substitute for seeking medical help. Lee hopes the site, currently free of advertisements and self-funded, will simply help consumers track illnesses.