As many of you know, WebMD is a leading health information internet portal, providing a wide range of medical information for both casual patients who browse the site and medical professionals. But, while the information WebMD provides is rich and valuable, it is still a static website, valuable, but not dynamic or intuitive or mobile.

Wolfram Research (maker of popular computational algebra system/scientific computing software Mathematica)’s new WolframAlpha search engine attacks the first two challenges. One of the fundamental problems with traditional portals like WebMD is that to find specific information, the user needs to have some idea of where the information is or how it’s stored/used in conjunction with other information – in other words, it requires contextual knowledge. For example, to figure out how to determine if someone is overweight, the user needs to know:

1. That BMI is the relevant metric
2. Where to find how to calculate BMI and where/how to get the information that goes into the BMI formula
3. Compare BMI with relevant comparisons
4. Understand the limitations and implications of the BMI metric

WolframAlpha tries to simplify this by reducing the dependence of the quality of the search results on contextual knowledge. In the BMI example above, WolframAlpha hasn’t quite solved how to easily and quickly answer steps 1 and 4, but it has made it much easier to do steps 2 and 3. For instance, the BMI of a person who is 5’ 10” and weighs 165 lbs and the relevant comparisons (to the US population as a whole, and to clinical definitions of “overweight”, etc.) What’s incredible is that WolframAlpha won’t only provide you with the data, if it’s feasible, it will even provide you with charts and graphs to illustrate them. While this is a far cry from Jeopardy-playing supercomputers, it is a much welcomed change to the current heavily context-dependent search paradigm.

And, WolframAlpha does a lot more than that. On their sample page of examples of health/medical requests, WolframAlpha breaks out several other capabilities:

• find growth charts/body statistics
• compute calories burned
• figure out Blood Alcohol Content levels
• estimate risks/mortality rates for diseases
• look up diagnoses by ICD-9 code
• understand medical test results
• look up information about drugs, hospitals, and public health information

Very cool, and, despite the more technical bent to information, much more usable than a standard search engine query for finding relevant health information. There is great promise in this technology, especially if it’s natural language processing algorithms improve to the point where it can provide useful information for healthcare professionals or curious/nervous patients (perhaps by combing through/organizing the information in WebMD’s healthcare-professional-oriented).

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