Managing your health with PowHealth.com - Perfect for busy mums!

My obsession with social media knows no bounds. I used to work in social marketing, then social recruitment and now I’m a professional blogger. I’m a regular reader of Tech Crunch and have countless apps on my iPhone to help me organise this chaotic life of mine. Therefore, when I was recently contacted about the launch of new social media health site PowHealth.com, I couldn’t resist a sneak peek.

This is what piqued my interest…

Do you have drawers full of paperwork, test results and appointment cards?

Are you always running to find the ‘red book’ to track your child’s health?

Do you forget some of your child’s symptoms in the panic of seeing the doctor?

Or do you just want to connect with someone quickly to get some advice?

Yep, yep, yep and yep. I find tracking appointments, monitoring minor illnesses and keeping on top of the children’s development a constant challenge. As our little family has grown, it feels like we live at the doctors, even when we’re not ill! There’s family planning, PND check-ups and smoking cessation for mummy, constant man-flu and allergies for Craigy, immunisations for Heidi and a variety of development checks and specialist appointments for the little man.

My kitchen is currently a homage to post-its and posterised notes to Craig about some appointment or another. Yet still we manage to miss appointments with increasing regularity.

With this in mind, PowHealth.com is really intriguing. It promises to help busy parents manage all their health needs in one place, helping them track their family’s general wellness as well as long term health conditions. With 60% of us in the UK having some form of long-term condition there’s certainly a demand for this kind of application.

Pow Health is a social media network to help you manage your health records and monitor your symptoms and progress, whether you’re doing it for yourself or your children. Parents often turn to each other for advice and Pow Health allows you to not only broaden your network generally but to focus on very specific communities who are in similar situations. Our aim is to bring the experts and the patients together in one place to start building better communications. Ifty Ahmed, CEO and Founder of PowHealth.com

This is a seriously smart website. Free to join yet rammed with clever and intuitive features.

When you join, you’re invited to fill in some basic profile information, join relevant communities, and record any conditions you are experiencing. So far, there are over 11,000 conditions currently listed on PowHealth.com, with more added as and when new users join. Against each condition you can then document any symptoms and track any medications - strict privacy settings will ensure this information is not accessible to others using the site.

Similarly you can input any allergies and appointments of your own and any dependents (i.e. your family). There are also daily trackers (sliders) to track your mood, any pain and a variety of other health indicators. The site then charts your health day-by-day so you can share this with your GP or monitor your emotional and physical wellbeing for yourself. On this same chart, you can add in events such as dosage changes, or cessation of treatment so you can see if there’s a notable change in your mood, pain levels etc.

These trackers can also be used to set personal goals – from child growth trackers, weight loss and calorific intake comparisons to tracking glucose and cholesterol levels. You can even record how much screen-time your children are indulging in. With Slimming World and Weight Watchers boasting huge successes due to regular interaction with other members, PowHealth.com might actually end up saving you a few quid if you’re trying to get beach-ready for summer.

Best of all, you control what you share. Your data is encrypted and held securely at a state-of-the-art data centre. However, if you do want to share your experience, seek guidance, or simply connect with others who share your goals or condition, you can join one of countless communities. There are over 400 communities covering lifestyle themes, such as women’s health, new mums, fitness & exercise; as well as condition-specific communities, such as; diabetes, high cholesterol and asthma.

These forums need padding out, but this will come as more of us join. I like how they’ve been designed with users in mind so you can instantly search for new topics or see what is trending in one-click. You’ll also get email notifications when new topics are posted, or someone has contributed to a discussion you are following. It’s all very slick.

The site aims to bring about a greater engagement with your health and that of your family. Close monitoring of your health promotes greater proactivity and a better prognosis for most medical conditions. Collectively harnessing shared experiences via the forums also allows for users to follow other people’s management of a similar condition, leading to greater awareness and making you feel better supported.

Soon you’ll also be able to connect popular apps and devices too, so you have all your information in one place and can track your health whilst out and about.

We are becoming increasingly health conscious, but at the same time our lifestyles are busier, more demanding and more cluttered in every respect, especially if you’re a parent. Pow Health was designed to help streamline anything related to health in people’s lives… Lots of people are sharing intimate health information on Facebook, though many won’t – by offering an anonymous environment which feels very social, just like Facebook, we hope people can engage with one another more effectively. Ifty Ahmed, CEO and Founder of Pow Health

Watch this short video to find out more: