On Monday, Microsoft made a big move into healthcare with the announcement that
the company will be buying Medstory, a Foster City, CA-based medical search
engine that uses AI to deliver relevant medical search results to consumers.
WebMD, the leader in the medical search field, made $80.6 million last year.
Interesting! Here's a clip from the NY Times article:
"In Medstory, Microsoft is acquiring “some of the best deep technology”
in the emerging field of medical search, said Esther Dyson, an industry analyst
who is also an investor in Medstory. That technology, Ms. Dyson said, is “not
so much a search engine, but an ontology engine,” with a capability to find
and identify concepts in health and not just sort through words and Web links.
The longer-range goal, Mr. Neupert said, is to link personal information like
age, sex, drug regimens, family history and even genetic markers to search. The
ideal is that search results are tailored individually, identifying treatments,
drug interactions and medical journal articles of interest.
“Health search could be way more relevant,” he said. “You don’t need to
see thousands of results. What you want to know is, what does this mean to me
personally?”
Here's a link to the official Microsoft press release with the announcement:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/feb07/02-26MSMedstoryPR.mspx
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