Apr 15

DoubleCheckMD.com Might Have Saved my Relative’s Life

By Caelen King Health 2.0 No Comments »

A close elderly relative of mine is currently being treated for a very serious and rare cancer-like condition. The exact details of the conditions are complex however suffice to say that without medication it would certainly be fatal.

He travels some distance every two weeks to a specialist hospital where he is examined, biopsied and prescribed an ever changing and ever growing cocktail of pharmaceuticals. The list had finally grown to 10 different tablets and powers to be taken throughout the day.

On his last visit he received some good news – the condition seems to be responding to the chemotherapy. The down side of this was more chemotherapy and yet more changes in the drug regime.

A few days after getting home he started to have a bad episode every morning at about 11 am. His blood pressure would plummet and his heart rate would crash down to 35 BPM. The effect was completely debilitating, so much so he couldn’t get out of his chair for hours.

After a few days of this recurring he rang his cardiologist who was shocked by the readings. He ordered my relative to immediately call the emergency services as the heart and blood pressure readings were right in the danger zone.

The next day he had another episode, however unwilling to make a fuss he didn’t call the emergency services but instead took a taxi to the cardiologist. However by the time he got there his pulse and blood pressure had returned to normal.

Depressed when he returned home he got the distinct feeling that the cardiologist didn’t believe him. He gave me a call and he discussed his fear that maybe there was a drug combination that was causing complications. He was concerned that he was on so many powerful and rare drugs that no specialist could be aware of all complications.

I immediately asked him for the list of drugs and logged onto doublecheckmd.com.
Within 5 minutes I had entered the drugs and symptoms. I was blown away by the sheer number of side effects and interactions. I pored over them and one side affect and one drug combination jumped out.

Amlodipine and bisoprolol when combined can seriously affect the heart rate and candesartan can
cause a precipitous drop in blood pressure.

I emailed off the results to him and armed with the data he called the hospital. The next day he took the long journey by train to hospital. After observation they agreed that the drugs combinations were the
cause of the issue and the interaction could easily be fatal.

Days later with new drugs in hand the episodes haven’t recurred and my relative has taken to punching in every drug himself into doublecheckmd.com

Apr 14

How to Invalidate your Own A/B Testing

By Caelen King Stuff we've learned, Web/Tech 2 Comments »

At RevaHealth, we do A/B or multi-variant testing on our website frequently. We have found that this is the best way of maintaing a website that consistently performs better over time. What’s fascinating about this form of testing is how often gut feel and professional advice turn out to be wrong. In our experience, nothing beats getting the pages out there and testing them with real users.

A couple of weeks ago we decided to A/B test our conversion page.

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This page hadn’t been examined properly in quite a while and had kind of organically changed as functionality was added to the product. When we looked at it we were shocked by how bad it was. I was amazed that anyone had the patience to deal with it at all!
There were loads of problems with the form including:
  1. Lots of distractions. Forms that convert well typically don’t feature anthing that could distract the user from the job at hand. Amazon take this so far as to even mute their own branding.
  2. The ‘call to action’ button was in the wrong place. Ideally it should be on the left hand side, directly under the fields.
  3. There were too many fields. You should always ruthlessly cut out unnecessary fields. In this instance we didn’t really need to have the consumer repeat their email address and we didn’t need them to tell us what treatments they needed as they typically included this information in the description field.
So we redesigned the page and we came up with the following:

6a00e54f09f406883401157011fd8a970b-800wiIt was a much simpler form and because it was shorter we were able to put the labels directly above the fields and still fit the call to action above the fold. I was sure it would perform better (Phil wasn’t, but he is an argumentative sort!). So we put it out to test, splitting 50% of our traffic to the new form and leaving 50% of our traffic to the old form.

Results came back indicating that the old form was performing better. I was aghast and examined the page in all contexts to discover what was wrong. It was then that I noticed something that invalidated the whole test. Something that should have been obvious right from the start. Take a good look at the two forms and see if you can spot it (click on the screen shots and they will open to full screen).
On the right had side of the first form you will spot the clinic’s phone number. But it’s not on the new form. This means that when someone lands on the old form they can do three things:
  1. They can fill out the form.
  2. The can go back.
  3. They can look up the phone number of the clinic, call the clinic and never even fill out the form (this is not necessarily a bad thing for us).
However, with the new form they could only do two of these things. This difference totally invalidated the test.
The moral of the story is, when you are A/B testing make sure you are testing like with like. We have redesigned the new form so as to do so. I’ll post back here in a few days with results.
Apr 06

30% Of Heart Operations For NI Patients Performed Outside The North

By Philip Boyle Uncategorized No Comments »

Some interesting news via the BBC; out of 1,430 heart operations carried out on people from Northern Ireland, 440 had to be performed in England or the Republic of Ireland. The operations cost £14,000 in England and £17,000 in the Republic of Ireland.

The figures are being publicised by the charity NI Chest, Heart and Stroke with the aim of getting all patients treated locally in Belfast. They say that the quality of some of the treatment outside of Northern Ireland "fell short of the high quality standards which are commonplace at the Royal Victoria Hospital".

I was interested to hear more about about this disparity in quality between operations carried out in Belfast and those carried out in London and Dublin, but there were no supporting figures provided, only a mention that "in some cases additional surgery has been needed once the patient returned to Northern Ireland".

I think it would be safe to assume that some patients who are treated in Northern Ireland also need additional surgery after their initial treatment, so it would be interesting to see the actual figures and compare like with like.

Apr 02

121 Marketing First Wednesday Club

By Caelen King Conferences, Start ups, Web/Tech 3 Comments »
Networking

Phil, Owen and I headed to the First Wednesday Club last night at the Mint Bar. Congrats to Karina Heavey of the 121 Marketing Network for setting it all up and for making it such a great event. Here are some of the people we spoke to:

Fiona D’Arcy- Head of Communications and Marketing at Silicon and Software Systems (S3), a company that provides next generation products and services to consumers.
Bertrand Raoult- Sales and Marketing Executive.
Jen Keane- Senior Web Developer at Cahill May Roberts, pharmaceutical distribution and wholesaling.
Peter Cullen- CEO of Interleado, internet marketing and search engine optimisation site.
David Jones- Hoping to breath some life into the Irish economy through his new venture For Paddy’s Sake- selling Irish affiliated merchandise to the diaspora worldwide.
Joe Newell- CFO of Ticket Text, a company that passes on savings to concert-goers by delivering  tickets directly to their mobile phones.
Lorcan O hUallachain- Founder of Only Brilliant.
Fred Caballero-Channelship, web design and internet marketing agency.

We hope to meet more people at the next First Wedneday Club, which will be May 6th.

Apr 01

Recesssion Causes Britons to Neglect their Teeth

By Caelen King Uncategorized 1 Comment »
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This morning the Daily Mail reports that almost 50% of the British population are putting off going to the dentist. Instead of being afraid of painful needles, they are instead concerned about the costs incurred, even with NHS dentists. Also, in some parts of Britain, one in three people are finding it difficult to even locate an NHS dentist in their area, with their only other options being shelling out even more to go private or foregoing much needed treatment.

As one of the few countries in the world to provide comprehensive “free” healthcare to its citizens, it is a shame to see the NHS failing so many people.

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