Praxeon News

Boston, MA - San Diego, CA -  July 9, 2010

Praxeon  (www.praxeon.com), a leader in healthcare and life science semantic searching platforms, announced today that it is providing its award winning platform, MyDailyApple, to the Nicholas Conor Institute (www.thenicholasconorinstitute.org).  MyDailyApple brings together medical news, research, communities, blogs, and stories from all over the web and personalizes all this health information to the healthcare consumer’s needs.

“We are delighted to join Praxeon’s Health Advocacy Platform Initiative (H.A.P.I.) and provide our members with a very powerful tool.  By having MyDailyApple on our website and accessible to our members, parents with children afflicted with pediatric cancer can now have the latest healthcare information and scientific developments at their fingertips. Having gone through the trauma of having a child diagnosed with pediatric cancer, I know how much access to the most current information means,” stated Beth Anne Baber, founder and CEO of The Nicholas Conor Institute for Pediatric Cancer Research.

Dr. Dennis Underwood, CEO, CSO and co-founder of Praxeon, said “We are very happy to provide our technology to the Nicholas Conor Institute.  Beth Anne has worked tirelessly in creating the Institute and we are happy to have the opportunity to help her in her efforts of educating and bringing together parents, researchers and scientists worldwide in order to share information and find cures for childhood cancer.  Our Health Advocacy Platform Initiative was launched in 2007 as a way for us to “give back” to the community.  By delivering MyDailyApple to the many members of HAPI, we allow them to have access to the latest information related to their specific ailment through an easy-to-access web-portal contained within their homepage.  It will help institute members in finding out more of their specific disease by conducting searches on a breadth of information related to pediatric cancer.”

You can help support The Nicholas Conor Institute for Pediatric Cancer Research by voting in the Chase Community Giving  Campaign – just click on the FaceBook link below and follow the instructions or copy and paste the link into a browser. 

http://apps.facebook.com/chasecommunitygiving/charities/261768860-nicholas-conor-institute-corporation

For more information on how your health advocacy group can join H.A.P.I. go to the Praxeon website (www.praxeon.com) or email:  hapi@praxeon.com.

About Nicholas Conor Institute

The Nicholas Conor Institute for Pediatric Cancer Research is a medical research organization dedicated to support the development of diagnostics, therapeutics and personalized programs specifically for children with cancer. The goal of the Institute is to establish efficient, mutually beneficial partnerships between industry, academia, clinicians and funding sources. These partnerships aim to develop predictive diagnostics to guide individualized therapy, to bring to the clinic new therapies that consider the unique molecular makeup of the child and to translate discoveries into integrated, personalized treatment programs.

About Praxeon

Praxeon is headquartered in Boston.  Our customers range from consumer & healthcare providers to insurance companies to contract research organizations (CROs) to pharmaceutical & biotech companies.

Its Semantic Fingerprint technology combined with Web 2.0+ tools helps solve difficult informatics’ challenges facing drug discovery & development, medicine and healthcare.

Discovery Lens integrates data from a combination of public, third party and proprietary sources and harvests and applies the resulting knowledge within such areas as: identifying new targets, repositioning drugs, risk analysis, biomarker discovery, adverse events as well as other critical R&D tasks. The MyDailyApple and CurbsideMD web-portals deliver valuable information to patients and physicians respectively.

MyDailyApple.com is delighted to welcome two new partners to its ever-expanding network:

California-based Parents Helping Parents was founded in 1976 to provide lifetime educational guidance, enlightened training support and comprehensive health-care resources to families of children with special needs and to the professionals who assist them.

Since 1982 the United Leukodystrophy Foundation (ULF) has pursued its mission to help and ultimately cure children afflicted with leukodystrophy through treatment, research, newborn screening, patient advocacy and educational programs.  The ULF also provides support services to dedicated family members and to the healthcare professionals who assist them.

MyDailyApple has always included the best objective health information on the web. But sometimes news and medical research is not enough. Often, it's a real person's experience that helps you gain that key insight to better understand your health. So starting today, MyDailyApple will include the discussions from the best on-line health communities. Real patient experiences - relevant to your interests - will be on display in a new "Your Communities" tab. You will have the ability to read, interact and discuss with real people - similar to you. The community discussions are just the start. You will also be able to recommend or criticize articles to other members of the MyDailyApple community. Reading and commenting on an article is just one of the ways we're making it easier to learn about your health while helping others. We've also made a few other improvements to make your health exploration easier:

• New site organization making it easier to find and read the information you're looking for.
• A remember topics section to more easily remember your health interests.
• A medical expertise selector that lets you control the type of content displayed by your level of expertise and comfort.
• The ability to view your news just for today, or to catch up on developments over the past week.

New Integrated Service Helps Consumers Find Relevant Health News and Blogs Related to Their Medical Information

Boston, MA – May 20, 2008 – Praxeon, Inc. announced today that its consumer health news and search site, MyDailyApple^TM (www.mydailyapple.com), is now available as an integrated service on the Google Health platform. Google Health is a new product that was launched today at a media event in Mountain View, California that allows users to store, organize, and manage their medical records online. The new Praxeon service gives Google Health users access to health news, blogs, and research information from the most trusted sources along with the ability to personalize that information to individuals’ health profiles.

“Google Health is a personal health service that paves the way towards consumer involvement and accountability,” said Kevin Cronin, CEO of Praxeon. “And MyDailyApple provides Google Health’s users with relevant and personalized health information so that users can be fully engaged in managing their own health.”

MyDailyApple uses data from an individual’s Google Health profile, upon their consent, to provide relevant health content that is personalized to their own health conditions or medications. MyDailyApple gives Google Health users pertinent, current health information from sources that are matched by medical relevance and by measures of community popularity. This combination of sophisticated health search technology and active user input leads to a richer, more informed, personalized health experience, driven by the most trustworthy health news and information.

“Praxeon's patent-pending semantic fingerprinting, natural language query and profile-based filtering technology is what sets Praxeon apart from other health information and search companies,” said Dennis Underwood, Chief Scientific Officer of Praxeon. “That technology powers Praxeon's top-rated health news and search products — MyDailyApple^TM for consumers and Curbside.MD^TM for healthcare providers — and delivers intelligent, organized and personalized answers to health questions.”

Praxeon’s sophisticated technology is revolutionizing the way people get health care information. Praxeon’s products have been extensively tested and validated by healthcare providers and by more than 20 health advocacy groups.  In 2007, Praxeon was voted “Best Health Search Company” at the Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, CA.

Google Health is available on the web at www.google.com/health

Today Praxeon is proud to introduce MyDailyApple, our personalized health information service for patients and health consumers.

MyDailyApple brings together news, blogs, and discussions from around the web and personalizes them to you based on a simple profile that describes your health interests. You can create this profile right on MyDailyApple, or import it from a personalized health record (PHR) system like Google Health or Microsoft Health Vault.

MyDailyApple delivers you a daily or weekly news bulletin through whichever channel you find the most convenient : email, RSS, a widget-based home page like iGoogle or NetVibes, or right on the MyDailyApple web site. We surround each article with

• Explanatory material and related articles to help you interpret its meaning and judge its quality
• Features to conveniently share it with friends and family
• Links to relevant discussions from trusted patient forums and communities

So if you have specific health interests and you want to stay informed, visit www.mydailyapple.com today and sign up using our simple one-page form.

And if you operate a health-related blog, discussion group, or web site, contact us today at info@praxeon.com to find out we can help you grow your audience through our personalized feeds.

Yesterday, Curbside.MD made it's big debut at the first annual Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco.  There were over 500 attendees.  And when the audience had a chance to vote for the best medical search engine - they selected Curbside.MD - over Healthline, Kosmix, Medstory and Healia.  We were #1!

It was a wonderful affirmation of our hard work and progress to date.  But we're not done yet.  We have exciting works in progress with personalized search and news, new content and a site that will be devoted exclusively for patients and their caregivers.  Look for more details on all of these exciting developments in the coming weeks!

Thanks to all of our users and supporters who have carried us to this moment.  And a special thanks to Matthew Holt and Indu Subaiya for putting on such a terrific event.  We hope to be at the next Health 2.0 Conference in the spring of 2008.

Today we have released an important update to www.curbside.md - the leading site for evidence-based answers to real medical questions.

What's New

On the upgraded site, you'll find new features to make your experience easier and to help find your answer faster:

1. Results overview: Redesigned with improved navigation of the Best Hits according to your medical task.
2. Drug and disease keywords: Enter a drug keyword, the Best Hits section is replaced with Drug Information from the FDA, broken into easy to navigate categories. Enter a disease keyword,  Best Hits is replaced with Disease Information, including definitions and relevant literature.
3. Enhanced readability: Improved formatting and markup of search hits and in-line abstracts enable you to quickly scan, read, and find your answer.
4. Better Feedback: An in-line feedback form so you can quickly let us know what you think, then get back to your task.
5. Refine your results: Filter any result set by disease and drug categories.
6. Context sensitive tips: Help you improve your queries and search results.

Get Involved

• Want to dive right into a search results page? Here's an example: What are the methods of risk stratification for anticoagulation to prevent stroke in patients with atrial fibrillation?
• We're dedicated to providing you with the best medical search experience possible. Let us know what you think. Your feedback is what drives us!

On a personal note, I'd like to extend my heartfelt thanks to the Austin-based user interaction experts at Expero. If you find the site even more appealing, more easily usable, and more powerful than it was before, then you are benefiting from their hard work and expertise!

Busy?  Who?  Us?  Well, I guess you could say that!  In the two months of being online we've been hard at work answering the requests coming from our community.  We’ve translated some of those requests into full-fledged projects that all fall under the “Curbside.MD Kit” umbrella.  Our kit consists of a number of tools that will make it easier for people to get answers to their clinical questions.  You can check it out at http://kit.curbside.md and see for yourself how our development team has taken to heart the mission of bringing Curbside.MD to your doorstep (computer-step?  browser-step?  Nevermind!)

For starters, people have quickly adopted the natural clinical language query supported by our search box.  The conversion rate from keyword-ese to free-form questions has even surprised us!  People have shared with us their excitement over being able to ask their questions as if they were speaking with an expert and not having to speak in broken English (refining their questions word-by-word until they get their thought across).  So to make it easier for people to ask their questions we have created a browser Add-on for Firefox and Internet Explorer (7.0) to add a Curbside.MD box right to your browser’s search toolbar.  Now you can ask sophisticated medical questions no matter where you are online!

Furthermore, in response to the people that have been pressing us to give them our search box, we have created 2 forms of a Curbside.MD hosted search box: Static versus Expanding.  Our static search box can sit on people’s web sites and accept clinical questions that get posted to Curbside.MD.  We have made the installation process extremely easy.  You can see an example running on the Accelerated Cure Project’s web site at http://www.acceleratedcure.org/msresources/curbside.php.

The expanding search box is “wicked” cool (sorry, I live in Boston!).  It only appears on clicking a “Search” button and expands out of nowhere using that fancy Ajax technology we’ve all grown to love.  This technique offers Curbside.MD access while minimizing the space required on people’s sites.  Don’t fuss about making room for us, we’ll make do!  It’s equivalent to riding a motorcycle to avoid the hassle of having to Pahk your cah in Hahvahd yahd (Ok, ok, I’ll stop!).  The expanding search box has all of the flavor found in the static search box, but with half the calories.  Read more about it on our Kit page.

Finally, we’re on the verge of deploying the Curbside.MD Forum!  The forum will provide a medical community for people to pursue further discussions on topics of interest.  We will have different forums depending on the community.  Physician forums, advocacy group forums, and academic forums will provide the stage for all of our supporters to use Curbside.MD to reach each other.  And to top it off, these forums will have Curbside.MD technology built right into them.  We are making it seamless to go from searching to posting forum questions or finding relevant conversations.  We also have an automated Curbside.MD Consultant that engages in each room by posting the most relevant medical evidence that is related to a discussion!  Think of it as having an expert piping in at appropriate times to help expand a conversation.

So, Yes, we have been busy.  Check out all of these projects on the Curbside.MD Kit page now available online at http://kit.curbside.md.  You will see the 4 tools already posted.  Keep an eye on this page because we will be listing more and more tools as they come online.  And feel free to suggest new ones to us.  We want to hear from you!  Really!