At a moment when people are more focused than ever on taking control of their health and well-being, StoryMD today launched a comprehensive, free digital platform offering authoritative health information paired with unmatched scientific visualizations and the ability for users to customize their experience.
StoryMD was built by founder and CEO Alexander Tsiaras, the creator of the acclaimed TheVisualMD, which created stunning data-informed visualizations of the human body. StoryMD has amassed and curated one of the world’s largest digital repositories of vetted, scientific medical information across nearly 5,000 health and wellness topics and 35,000 articles. Enhanced by 37,000 videos and over 60,000 images and interactive tools, it is an unprecedented visual health library of information from reliable open sources. StoryMD’s team of scientists, mathematicians, visual designers, programmers, and editors has made this vast collection of information from trustworthy sources—including the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)—accessible, understandable, and relevant.
“StoryMD will revolutionize how we take control of our own health story,” said Tsiaras. “So many of us are seeking factual health information that directly relates to our lives and circumstances. Until now, that information had to be cobbled together from different, sometimes unauthenticated sources. StoryMD puts vetted health information directly into the hands of anyone who wants it, enlivens it with our extraordinary visualizations of the human body and its conditions, and allows users to customize their experience based on their situation or interests. It’s the single place where, from conception to advanced age, your personal health and wellness data will live alongside relevant health insights and opportunities for engagement and community-building, empowering you to truly understand and actively manage your health.”
StoryMD organizes health topics into more than 1,500 HealthJournals, simple-to-understand, vividly-illustrated, information-rich stories on various topics including health conditions, pathologies, treatments, anatomy, and nutrition. Other HealthJournals and articles are focused on prevention, offering insights into interactive biomarkers of risk and strategies to stave off disease, as well as user-friendly information on a wide range of medications.
The bi-directional platform features a variety of tools that allow users to customize their experience. With My Collections, users can collect, group, and share the HealthJournals that are most relevant or interesting to them, creating personal collections of the best information and most powerful visuals available. StoryMD Author, a visual editing application, gives users access to the StoryMD visual library to create and share their own HealthJournals. Beautifully-visualized newsletters will provide deeper dives into topics of interest.
As part of its launch, StoryMD has developed GENESIS, a comprehensive suite of content featuring more than 300 HealthJournals that give prospective, expectant, and new parents a better way to understand and manage every aspect of fertility and pregnancy, from in vitro fertilization to interpreting genetic testing information, through birth and continuing into toddlerhood and early development. Unlike pregnancy sites, fertility apps, and baby portals, StoryMD combines the entire journey of making a human in one site, and allows users to overlay that experience with other conditions and interests. Other upcoming StoryMD content features will focus on important topics including sexual health, heart health, women’s health, and diabetes.
GENESIS is the culmination of a pioneering, four-decade journey in visualizing the marvel of the creation and development of a new life: Tsiaras is widely known for designing the first microscope that could capture the moment of in vitro fertilization, an achievement that was celebrated on the cover of LIFE. He then developed more advanced technology to give the world the first multidimensional visualizations of fetal and embryonic development, which appeared on the cover of TIME and were celebrated on Oprah. Tsiaras’ book From Conception to Birth broke barriers upon its publication, and his TED Talk of the same name has been viewed millions of times.
In the coming months, StoryMD will roll out first-of-their-kind personalization features that include the ability for users to upload and organize their personal health information—including fitness data from wearables, lab test results, fertility journal entries, and medication lists—rather than piecing it together from various sites and apps. For example, a user newly diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes will have the ability to upload their lab results, get information that puts those results into context, and read about potential complications. Additionally, StoryMD communities built around HealthJournals will allow users to start or join conversations centered around common interests, all within a monitored science-and-facts-first environment, rather than in social media groups.
“We have always been passengers on our own health journeys—passive participants who comply with the instructions we’re given to improve our health and wellness, or to battle disease and illness,” added Tsiaras. “StoryMD is designed to turn that dynamic on its head by giving our users powerful tools to finally become drivers of their health and wellness stories.”