Here we interview head of BizDev Tom Lund of Northampton, MA-based Healthcommunities. We find their microsites (plural) approach very cagey in a search-centric world.
Their description: Healthcommunities.com, Inc., (HC) provides reliable, physician-developed patient education to consumers, medical website design services for doctors, and online directories of doctors. By delivering condition and treatment information that consumers and their physicians have grown to trust, HC improves quality of care and enhances the patient-physician relationship.
1. Tell us about the impetus to start Healthcommunities.com?
ANSWER: Dr. Stanley J. Swierzewski III, a practicing urologist, founded Healthcommunities.com, Inc., a decade ago. Dr. Swierzewski was one of the first physicians to see the value of the Internet for helping patients research medical conditions online. In addition to his medical background, he is an entrepreneur who realized the opportunity the Web provided to help more patients than he could see in his office. Urologychannel (http://www.urologychannel.com) was the first patient education website Dr. Swierzewski developed. Patients with urological conditions often go untreated for long periods of time due to the embarrassment of discussing urological problems such as incontinence. Urologychannel was one of the first online resources that allowed people to access information about incontinence, find out that it's common and often treatable, and help them find a urologist. It provides a great deal of satisfaction to know that, over the last ten years, we have helped many people who may have otherwise continued to struggle unnecessarily with a condition in private.
2. What makes your site different than other eHealth sites?
ANSWER: One difference is that Healthcommunities.com, Inc., is not a single patient education website: it is a collection of 30 individual, specialty-specific websites. After the success of urologychannel, Dr. Swierzewski launched additional websites, such as neurologychannel, oncologychannel, womenshealthchannel, painchannel, and podiatrychannel, et. al. each website standing on its own as a distinct enterprise. The specialty-specific focus of each website not only encourages participation by medical specialists who become involved in the development of the websites, but also makes it easier for browsers to navigate to the specific information that will be most helpful to them. Our most recent channel website launched was gichannel, http://www.gichannel.com.
Other differences are Dr. Swierzewski's day-to-day involvement in the decision-making process, and his willingness to open up the endeavor to other medical specialists who express an interest in getting involved. The patient education information is developed and monitored by an otherwise unaffiliated, volunteer body of practicing, board-certified physicians. Both Dr. Swierzewski's influence and the involvement of other medical specialists who suggest and review content and participate in the peer-to-peer forums provide real depth and a practical, unbiased feel to the websites that resonates with browsers. We don't cover every medical specialty yet (we're working on that), but the ones we do cover, we cover in depth.
3. How are your current audience metrics, and what are you doing to drive traffic (we noted this ramp, very impressive)?
ANSWER: All our traffic comes from organic search, referrals, or direct links. Growth in traffic has been surging (nearly 30% increase in pageviews in February year-over-year), but it's difficult for Quantcast and other media measurement services to capture that information because of the unique way our websites are positioned. Each medical specialty has its own website and Quantcast and comScore, et. al., don't report the combined traffic across our network all together.
Our audience metrics are improving and we have started doing a better job of engaging browsers, but we're not out to increase audience metrics, such as pages viewed, time on site, and repeat visits just for the sake of increasing them. We're all about helping patients, and if a healthcare consumer can get the information he or she needs in one quick visit to our sites, we've done our job. We only want to keep people on our website if we can provide additional helpful information. We are improving our ability to create relationships with patients when necessary, such as helping those who are managing chronic conditions or those who have continuing questions about a treatment or diagnosis. We have a number of active, condition- specific, peer-to-peer forums and physicians in our network are becoming more prominent in these forums, contributing posts and offering guidance, without providing specific diagnostic or treatment information. We also have "Living with..." sections where browsers can share information about what it's like to live with a certain medical condition and share tips or frustrations. "Living with…" stories are moderated, reviewed, and edited by our staff. Browsers can also comment on our physician-developed and -moderated clinical condition information. These comments are evaluated by our editorial team and verified for accuracy.
4. How do you monetize the site?
We monetize the websites through display advertising and sponsorship, and do some e-mail marketing, too. An additional part of our business is building websites for physician practices and we receive monthly subscription payments for these sites. We've built physician practice websites for as long as we've hosted the patient education portals, such as urologychannel, since 1998. We have a large network of custom sites covering thirty different medical specialties. When a practice signs up for a website, they are paired with a website manager, who works with the practice to customize the site and coordinates the efforts of our in-house content, design, and website architecture teams. Lastly, we have a proprietary physician finder, MDLocator, which physicians can subscribe to. Physicians that have websites with us are listed in MDLocator for free.
5. Regarding audience, are you Direct-to-Consumer, working through partners on a private-label or other basis, or both?
Our patient education portals are DTC, our network of physician practice websites give us a Direct-to-Physician component, and the physician practice websites link to the patient education portals (e.g., urologychannel) so we provide a unique meeting place for healthcare consumers and physicians. The healthcare consumers and physicians come together in our peer-to-peer forums and when healthcare consumers navigate to a specific physician practice using MDLocator.
6. What do you have coming soon that we should know about?
In August 2008, Healthcommunities.com will launch kidshealthchannel. This new website will provide important information about children's health issues to expectant parents, parents, guardians, and caregivers of children from birth to adolescence. Pediatricians who are interested in contributing to the development of kidshealthchannel should contact Healthcommunities.com as soon as possible.
We cover the key Online Health/PHR/EMR companies in our wiki; the entire list is here. Should we be covering your company? Email us at mattc [@] marketintellnow.com.
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