Dr. Sara Mobasseri, a cardiologist with the Piedmont Heart Institute, has been practicing for nine years and heads up the women’s heart health services at Piedmont Hospital. But you don’t have to live in metro Atlanta or make an office appointment to benefit from her expert advice.
Consumers can ask questions and receive Mobasseri’s answers through Sharecare.com, a new interactive, Web-based health and wellness platform. The site was launched last fall with the backing of WebMD founder Jeff Arnold and Dr. Mehmet Oz (cardiac surgeon and host of “The Dr. Oz Show”) in a partnership with Piedmont Heart Institute and other hospitals and health organizations.
Sharecare’s mission is to bring together all facets of health and wellness — physical, emotional, intellectual and social — on one interactive site. Sharecare strives “to become a trusted resource for accurate, multiperspective and high-quality answers to questions of health, and we are actively expanding our already impressive roster of prestigious institutions, hospitals, physicians, nonprofits, professional societies and leading brands in the health care industry to provide answers,” said Arnold, chairman and architect of Sharecare.
A high-quality medical information site fit perfectly with the Piedmont Heart Institute’s mission to provide cutting-edge cardiac prevention and care, as well as a growing trend for consumers to be more proactive about their health. Doctors readily volunteered time to serve as resources for patients they will probably never meet.
“I’m proud to be considered an expert and feel privileged to be part of this initiative,” Mobasseri said. “I love what I do and this is a different way of communicating with people about their health. I think it’s wonderful that this site gives people access to physicians at top-tier hospitals, and that they can get multiple points of view.”
Physicians and other experts can update answers as they learn more information from newer research.
Mobasseri answers general questions about heart health and specific questions about symptoms or diagnoses.
“I’ve answered the questions as if I was speaking to a patient in my office, and I always caution people to discuss their questions and issues with their doctor,” she said. “We don’t want them diagnosing themselves over the Internet.”
Face-to-face interaction with doctors will never go away, “but there is a growing trend for people to seek opinions and advice over the computer,” said Dr. Nirav Raval, a cardiovascular specialist who practices with the Piedmont Heart Institute.
Because Sharecare has enlisted only credentialed professionals as experts to give high-quality opinions, Raval decided to volunteer his time.
“Congestive heart-failure patients are all different, and this site allows them to ask very specific questions from specific clinicians,” he said. “It can be almost like getting a second opinion.”
Raval said that it’s a good that people are seeking more information and taking greater responsibility for their health.
“If a patient can ask more-intelligent or more-thorough questions when he is with his doctor, then the doctor can move forward more expeditiously,” Raval said. “I like it when a patient has done his research. When a patient understands his disease better, we can use that as a springboard to help him.”
Sharecare users can choose experts from a host of sources, including Brigham and Women’s Hospital (Boston), Cleveland Clinic, Johns Hopkins Medicine (Baltimore), the Mount Sinai Center (New York City), New York-Presbyterian Hospital, the American Cancer Society, the American Diabetes Association and the American Red Cross.
Sigma Theta Tau International, the honor society of nursing, is Sharecare’s exclusive nursing organization for expert answers.
“The nurses’ perspective is important because consumers rank nurses as one of the most-trusted professions in health care, according to Gallup Honesty and Ethics rankings,” said Patricia E. Thompson, CEO of Sigma Theta Tau International. “We are pleased about our partnership with Sharecare, and we are excited to support the advancement of health education through this multidisciplinary website.”
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