“It’s difficult for any startup, but even more so for anything social media related, especially with sites like Facebook in the picture,” said Wade Sikkink, chief marketing officer for Collaborative Health Solutions, a health-care information service that launched its own social media portal, Medizzle, on May 19. “You’ve got to have a reason for people to come to you that they don’t have at another place. The question we get a lot is, ‘Why wouldn’t I just form a Facebook Group, or a Yahoo! Group or a Google Group?’”

For Medizzle, that reason is the site’s host of social networking tools aimed at sufferers of chronic illness. One such gadget is an algorithmic matching tool that sorts users by their illness, the sickness’s risk factor… even individual symptoms. People and groups are sorted by relevance and then rated according to compatibility with the user on a scale of one to five stars.

“We have the ability to provide tools that aren’t as important to a general audience, but there’s value in talking to someone who has not only other same illness, but also the same symptoms,” said Sikkink, who works out of the multi-city company’s Lincoln office. ”Our tools let people find exactly who they want to find, down to the symptom, whereas with other sites, you’ve just got scour profiles and message boards.”

Medizzle also boasts an extensive illness database, a comprehensive list of more than 750 illnesses and corresponding symptoms. The site also offers unparalleled privacy controls, including state-of-the-art encryption and a unique take on inputting user information.

“Unlike other sites, all we require is an email address and a unique user name,” Sikkink said. “Once you’re in, you decide what information you want to add. Of course, the more info you give us, the better our matching tool does.”

Since the social media portal’s launch a couple months ago, Sikkink has been hard at work promoting Medizzle and Collaborative Health Solutions. He and the other members of CHS attended May’s TechCrunch Disrupt event in New York City. Although the startup event didn’t have much to do with the medical field, Sikkink still considered the overall experience invaluable.

“We demoed our product non-stop,” he said. “At events like (TechCrunch), you give your pitch about a hundred times a day; you get your five-minute pitch down to a science. I’d encourage any startup to get out to these events, because it gives you that exposure, gives you that practice.”

CHS also signed Fibromyalgia and Fatigue Centers, an umbrella company composed of more than 15 clinics nationwide dedicated to treating Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, on as an advertiser and partner. But for the most part, Sikkink has promoted Medizzle through word-of-mouth. The service now has several hundred users, with numbers steadily climbing following an initial spike coinciding with the product’s launch.

“We’re off to a pretty good start, given our level of non-advertising,” Sikkink said. “We’re going to have to continue to find other interesting things to draw people in. It’s growing on its own now, things are happening, but it’s just a process that takes some time to slowly build up.”