We're rolling out our slate of eHealth Innovators. eDrugSearch is the 3rd of 10; see the whole list in coming weeks on our blog, to the right.
You may know our Trend #8 in eHealth:
Consumers Vetting Docs/Hospitals, Seeking Savings.
eDrugSearch (San Antonio, TX) is about helping folks save on prescription drugs, and the site has a user-interface that's intuitive and a virtually frictionless guide to good data to conserve precious medical funds.
Here we interview founder/CEO Cary Byrd:
1. Tell us about the impetus to start eDrugSearch.com?
ANSWER: More than 65 million Americans live without prescription drug insurance. While many U.S. consumers look to Canadian or other non-U.S. pharmacies as a means of saving money, they are often concerned about whether they can trust the quality and safety of the prescription drugs they find online.
eDrugSearch.com reassures these consumers by only accepting pharmacies that pass an 11-point prescreening process - including proof of home-country licensing and third-party accreditations. We'll filling a real need for prescription drug consumers who want to save money -- but also want to be safe.
2. How are your current audience metrics, and what are you doing to drive traffic?
ANSWER: Since we launched in early 2007, eDrugSearch.com has referred more than 875,000 visitors to its 40 member pharmacies, including 175,000 in March. These referrals have generated an estimated $2.1 million in sales for member pharmacies, including about $435,000 in March alone. We've had well over five million searches conducted on the site.
So far, all this growth has come without the benefit of advertising. We've done no SEM, no AdWords, no banner ads. We've used a variety of SEO strategies, in addition to the eDrugSearch Blog and Healthcare 100 rankings, to attract interest in our site. The Healthcare 100, in fact, was recently mentioned in the Wall Street Journal. We've also attracted TV and newspaper coverage and received a fair amount of buzz online.
3. How do you monetize the site?
ANSWER: We aren't monetizing it -- yet. We haven't begun to collect revenues from member pharmacies. For a brief time we ran some advertising on the site, but I decided the ads caused too much clutter and decided to remove them to improve the user experience.
I respect Google's approach; they waited until they were the gold standard for search before they began monetizing their service. I think we've reached a similar level, within our vertical, with eDrugSearch.com. So we're currently putting together the billing system to begin collecting revenues from member pharmacies later this year. Pharmacies will be charged a share of the sales we bring them. As stated, that's over $2 million in sales since we launched -- with the trend lines looking very strong.
4. Regarding audience, are you direct-to-consumer, working through partners on a private-label or other basis, or both?
ANSWER: We are reaching consumers directly, primarily via organic search. We expect to add an affiliate program later this year, once the billing system is in place and we begin collecting revenues from member pharmacies.
5. What do you have coming soon that we should know about?
ANSWER: We launched our social network -- the eDrugSearch.com Community -- at the end of February, and it's already proving to be a powerful addition to the site. The eDrugSearch.com Community has led to a dramatic increase in the amount of time the average visitor spends on the site - which has led not only to overall growth in sales, but to an increase in sales per visitor.
Before we launched the community, most of our visitors bought some - but not all - of their prescription drugs through our site. Thanks to the community, we're beginning to form much stronger and more personal relationships with these customers. The site is 'stickier' now. One result of this is that more of our members are choosing to purchase all of their medications through eDrugSearch.com.
We also soon will be offering exclusive drug discounts to members who actively participate in the eDrugSearch.com Community. People come to eDrugSearch.com to save money, and this will be another way for them to do that.
Read more in our 150-page SPOTLIGHT REPORT, updated each month. We carve out four discrete segments in eHealth, and tell you what's happening, how and why, including detailed revenue projections:
a. News/Search/Community
b. EMR
c. PHR
d. Digital Home Health.
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