caveats: they’re new; it’s hard to do what they’re doing; they have to look serious; this is valuable the more it’s taken seriously.
They have really wonderful site design/marketing...except that it doesn’t give me the impression that they will ever be making the world better for anyone other than their clients. Here’s what I’d see as ideal:
They’ve either paid the $5k themselves, a drop in the bucket of their funding apparently, and put up one report as both a sample and proof of their intent to publish reports for everyone, or (better) gotten a client who’s had a report to agree to allow them to release it.
This report, above, is linked to from their news section and there’s a prominent search field on the news section (ok), or there’s a separate reports section (better)
The news section has RSS (or the reports section has RSS, or both, best)
On a more profiteering viewpoint, they could offer a report for either $5k for a private report, or $3k for a public report, with a promise to charge $50 for the public report until they reach $5k (or $6k, or an internal number that isn’t unreasonable) and then release it.
Most people who are seriously sick tend to get into a pretty idealistic mode, is my experience, and would actually be further convinced by putting their $5k both to help themselves and to help others, and while sure, they could release the report themselves, metamed has a central, more trustable platform. If they want me to believe that they’re interested in doing that kind of thing, it’d be nice if they had something up there to show me that they hope to.
On preview, I realize that the easy objection is that these are personalized reports, and data confidentiality is important. They obviously will only be able to publish pieces of reports that are not personal, and this is obviously a more costly thing than just tossing a pdf up on a website. Hm.
All of that said, they look like a really exciting company, I really hope they do well (and then take my advice =).
A patient might profit from open publishing of the report. If MetaMed starts getting a reputation for good reports it will get read by medical experts. If an experts reads something that’s wrong in the report it would be great if there a way for that expert write a comment under the report. That comment could be very helpful to the patient.
They’re all hardcore x-risk reductionists and good people. I would be very surprised if they didn’t do everything they could to help people in any way they could as soon as it made sense, and they weren’t sacrificing long term goals for shorter term ones.
I suspect that later, when they have more presence in the public and expert view, they will open up new payment options to increase visibility of their reports, but only after they have employed significantly more researchers and run them through rigorous epistemic ethics training. Otherwise, there’s little stopping a Big Pharma company from hiring Metamed for a $3,000 report, and then posting a biased summary of the report on their news page, along with an “APPROVED BY METAMED” sticker. Even worse if Metamed considers the “approval sticker” to be useful to spreading awareness of evidence-based medicine. The potential for corruption is just too high.
caveats: they’re new; it’s hard to do what they’re doing; they have to look serious; this is valuable the more it’s taken seriously.
They have really wonderful site design/marketing...except that it doesn’t give me the impression that they will ever be making the world better for anyone other than their clients. Here’s what I’d see as ideal:
They’ve either paid the $5k themselves, a drop in the bucket of their funding apparently, and put up one report as both a sample and proof of their intent to publish reports for everyone, or (better) gotten a client who’s had a report to agree to allow them to release it.
This report, above, is linked to from their news section and there’s a prominent search field on the news section (ok), or there’s a separate reports section (better)
The news section has RSS (or the reports section has RSS, or both, best)
On a more profiteering viewpoint, they could offer a report for either $5k for a private report, or $3k for a public report, with a promise to charge $50 for the public report until they reach $5k (or $6k, or an internal number that isn’t unreasonable) and then release it.
Most people who are seriously sick tend to get into a pretty idealistic mode, is my experience, and would actually be further convinced by putting their $5k both to help themselves and to help others, and while sure, they could release the report themselves, metamed has a central, more trustable platform. If they want me to believe that they’re interested in doing that kind of thing, it’d be nice if they had something up there to show me that they hope to.
On preview, I realize that the easy objection is that these are personalized reports, and data confidentiality is important. They obviously will only be able to publish pieces of reports that are not personal, and this is obviously a more costly thing than just tossing a pdf up on a website. Hm.
All of that said, they look like a really exciting company, I really hope they do well (and then take my advice =).
A patient might profit from open publishing of the report. If MetaMed starts getting a reputation for good reports it will get read by medical experts. If an experts reads something that’s wrong in the report it would be great if there a way for that expert write a comment under the report. That comment could be very helpful to the patient.
I’m not sure that’s the best scheme, but I’m hoping MetaMed finds some way of taking their findings public.
They’re all hardcore x-risk reductionists and good people. I would be very surprised if they didn’t do everything they could to help people in any way they could as soon as it made sense, and they weren’t sacrificing long term goals for shorter term ones.
I suspect that later, when they have more presence in the public and expert view, they will open up new payment options to increase visibility of their reports, but only after they have employed significantly more researchers and run them through rigorous epistemic ethics training. Otherwise, there’s little stopping a Big Pharma company from hiring Metamed for a $3,000 report, and then posting a biased summary of the report on their news page, along with an “APPROVED BY METAMED” sticker. Even worse if Metamed considers the “approval sticker” to be useful to spreading awareness of evidence-based medicine. The potential for corruption is just too high.