Sapient Health Network
Portland, Oregon

Highlights:

Provides highly personalized Web access to medical information for individual healthcare consumers.

Background:

Sapient Health Network, founded in 1995, is devoted to providing information tools to chronically ill people -- a group of consumers with intense information needs. In these days of managed health care, where clinicians have limited time to spend with individual patients for disease and treatment education, people with chronic or long-term illnesses need a source of focused, comprehensible information.

There's no dearth of medical information. In fact, it is estimated that there are four million servers on-line with medical information; that number grows 20% per month. But this volume of data is unmanageable in the best of circumstances. One key word search on a common disease, such as breast cancer, can turn up 40,000 entries. For the chronically ill person, the result is so overwhelming that the data becomes useless in their fight against their illness.

To address this need, Sapient has developed a service that provides consumers with access to medical information in a highly individualized way. Its goals are to: increase individuals' understanding of their own health condition and aid them in making decisions regarding their medical treatment and lifestyle management. General Magic's Tabriz products play a key role in actualizing Sapient's vision.

Application:

Sapient Health Network provides its subscribers with services through the use of a "personal profile." This electronic representation of the subscriber maintains all the pertinent information -- her diagnosis, her medications, her interests. The profile navigates through thousands of information sources on behalf of the subscriber, extracting and retrieving only the information specifically relevant to that unique individual.

Within the service, there are several types of resources to which a subscriber has access: News, Reference, Community, Personal Information Management and Electronic Shopping. News highlights current medical advances and recently released articles about specific illnesses, much like a personal daily newspaper. Reference contains materials describing symptoms, treatment options, conventional and alternative therapies and directories of medications, resources and centers of excellence. News and References selections are gathered and presented based on their match to the subscriber's profile.

Community is a multi-layered forum for interaction and communication. In Community, people with similar needs can share information and form electronic support groups. Medical Organizer is personal information management software that allows individuals to keep track of addresses, appointments and notes. The Medical e-Mall provides access to goods and services that are appropriate to the needs of individual subscribers.

Sapient Health Network's computing platform is based on persistent, intelligent agent technology. Agents created with General Magic's Tabriz navigate myriad Web sites, find, manage and present content to the subscriber, based on their personal profile. "Tabriz is very good for dispatching active, persistent agents to search for information at different Web sites, databases and content sources," said Jim Kean, president of Sapient Health Network. "And because Tabriz is also a communications technology, we can give our subscribers the option of receiving their unique information on their own personal Web page, on a fax or even via a pager."

Benefits:

Using Tabriz products enables Sapient Health Network to be scaleable -- to expand its services and the breadth of diseases covered without having to add content processing staff. "Using active, persistent agents is much more efficient in the finding, gathering, sorting and copying of Web-based information than employing a staff of researchers," said Kean. "We believe that we have designed a technology platform that will allow us to address the information needs of many types of chronically ill people, offer information services at a fair price, and be a profitable enterprise."

For more information:

Justin Jackson
Burns McClellan Public Relations
(212) 505-1919, ext. 12

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