The Health Chain (thehealthchain.com) is a free online secure and private health support group covering a variety of chronic conditions.

Our focus is health and health care. The Health Chain allows you to connect with people with similar health conditions to form virtual support groups and to benefit from their knowledge and experiences and share your experiences too. Gaining health support from others in a similar situation can be far more valuable than just relying on science. An online health support group is also a lot easier to access than a physical health support group.

Our intention is the make the site as discrete as possible. The site allows you to choose levels of sharing when sharing information on the site. The 4 levels are:

Share with the world – these messages are visible to people searching on search engines, social networks and on the front page of the site.

Share with everyone on The Health Chain (everyone logged in would see these shares).

Share with Links (our version of friends, only your Links would see these shares)

Share with one of the conditions you have or support (if you have Asthma you can share only with other people who have Asthma etc)

These share levels drive the integrity and security of the site seeing that a lot of people do not want everyone to see their information.

Other current functionality are user created Pages where users create interesting content e.g condition friendly recipes or articles about certain doctors or organizations, recording and graphing of vital signs (e.g blood pressure, blood sugar), a medication entry system, condition driven news feeds (if you have Asthma you can filter the news you see to be only for Asthma) and email like messaging and blogging.

Our intentions for the future would be:

For doctors and pharmacists to get involved posting messages that would help "patients".

For pharmacies to have their own account and for individuals to record the medication they take or what allergies they have. The pharmacy would have the ability to look the person up on The Health Chain (if they came into their pharmacy) and see what medications they are taking or what allergies they have. The pharmacist would then have some guidance on what they can and cannot give to that patient.

Organised virtual real-time support group meetings set up by administrators of groups or pages. Members of these groups would be sent notifications of these meetings. It would be like a formal gathering in the comfort of your own home.

Author's Bio: 

We are a small company based in Cape Town, South Africa and have been in existence for 2 years now. The company was founded by a doctor and senior developer with decades of experience in the medical industry.