Here we interview VP/CorpDev Howard Yeh from Miami-based HealthCare.com.
THEIR DESCRIPTION: HealthCare.com, with its flagship web property at http://www.healthcare.com, features the web's leading healthcare provider directory connecting health consumers with healthcare professionals and healthcare-related businesses. In addition to operating a leading online health website, HealthCare.com has syndicated the Care Provider SearchT to leading newspaper websites, local media and health portals, allowing its partners' audiences to engage with local health providers. Syndication partners include MedHelp, AOL Health, Everyday Health and drugstore.com. For health professionals, HealthCare.com offers free profile pages, free email service, a blogging platform, and a soon-to-be-launched healthcare jobs search engine. For health consumers, HealthCare.com offers informational content through a health portal, health content search, health products and health medications.
1. What is HealthCare.com's positioning in the increasingly crowded eHealth marketplace?
We are witnessing several pockets of eHealth companies doing different things. Some of these include:
- General health information portals for consumers (WebMD, AOL Health,
Yahoo! Health, Everyday Health, Revolution, Health.com)
- Health/medical/condition communities (MedHelp, DailyStrength, Real
Mental Health)
- Health search (HealthVault/Microsoft, RightHealth, Healthline)
- eHealth applications (patient-doc communications, health records, etc.)
- Healthcare ecommerce.
While eHealth is a large, and as you described a crowded, marketplace with many competitors, we are focused on one area in particular, which is healthcare provider search. Our core product is what we call HealthCare.com "Care Provider Search", which is what we believe to be the most comprehensive healthcare provider directory on the web. Through this product, we enable healthcare providers to claim their profile pages for free, and to upsell advertising products and services on top of it. We operate in a hybrid space between online health and local search. By providing vertical expertise, we can provide better data, features and functionality than existing sources of information. Furthermore, our syndication strategy (as displayed in the partnership announcement with MedHelp), enables us to partner with existing health and local traffic sources to provide our provider search functionality for their websites, which results in a mutual benefit in terms of both content and revenue. Our goal is not to compete head-on by re-creating functionality that exists in the marketplace already. Our goal is instead to provide our core healthcare provider search functionality to other health sites, and monetize together.
We are in fact partnered with several of the companies listed above, including MedHelp (http://www.medhelp.org/find-a-doctor
2. How does HealthCare.com generate revenue?
Our business is driven off online advertising. However, there is an important distinction to most ad-driven websites in the health arena in that our model does not center upon pharmaceutical and consumer packaged goods advertising, but rather on local provider advertising.
We offer local healthcare advertisers, both directly and through our distribution and reseller partners, the opportunity to purchase featured listings and sponsored advertisements within our platform. Healthcare services is inherently local, and we are leveraging this fact to provide a health-targeted and location-targeted ad medium. The selling point to a local advertiser is not just to place advertising within HealthCare.com, but, for example, for a Miami-based healthcare provider (from hospitals down to individual dentist offices) to place advertising within a new healthcare provider directory on MiamiHerald.com. On top of what is described above, we also serve targeted PPC advertising and health-targeted display advertising.
3. Tell us about your partnering strategy (e.g., recently with MedHelp)?
We made a decision early-on in our product development to provide our directory as part of a web syndication platform. We are in the primary business of building an advertising platform, and not solely an online media roperty (although HealthCare.com is a leading one). Thus, we provide the platform to enable third-party sites to offer the same provider search technology on their sites as is provided on HealthCare.com in a partner-friendly implementation. We have designed our syndication platform based on the early market research we did in speaking with potential site partners. We've incorporated many of the attributes they have requested that would make the syndication of our directory a "no-brainer" in their words. These include full branding, traffic attribution, URL masking, right to ad inventory, and a revenue share model.
This strategy has allowed us to leverage existing traffic sources to widen our distribution. It furthermore allows us to have far more partners than competitors.
We generally have two kinds of partners:
a) Local partners: These primarily include newspaper websites, but can also include TV station websites and other local media destinations. These sites enable us to provide hyper-local targeting, which is strategic from both a community engagement and advertising standpoint.
b) Health site partners: These include health websites that are able to provide a fully-branded, out-of-the-box provider search capability to add an additional feature for their users. Partners include not only MedHelp, but also AOL Health, Everyday Health, drugstore.com and Real Mental Health.
The partnering strategy is also important in our efforts to engage the health provider community. Providers are free to claim and update their listings and profiles on our care provider search platform. Doctors are not generally in front of their PCs with time to invest in building an online presence for themselves. The implication is that they are less likely to spend the time for a one-off profile page. However, by aggregating audiences through multiple websites, we seek to make the proposition to healthcare providers for more compelling.
Our philosophy on partnering goes the other way for HealthCare.com as a property. In a similar way that we provide content to other website partners on a hosted, fully-branded, revenue share basis, we are open to having other companies offer the same for syndication onto HealthCare.com.
4. What firms do you consider your key competitors, and why?
There are several players in healthcare provider search. However, the main competitors to what we are doing are the alternative sources of provider information today. These primarily include general search engines, insurance websites and the online yellow pages. We can compete against these alternatives by providing more targeted results, more data, and better search capability. I'm not proposing that we can out-muscle Google in search (which would be a ludicrous assertion), but we can provide a unique feature set to uses because of our vertical focus. We also make it easier to find information, both in where to look (which explains in part our partnering strategy described above) and in ease of use.
Some of the existing players in healthcare provider search include HealthGrades, Revolution, Vitals, Wellness.com and Xoova. Most of their products are focused solely on doctors and hospitals, and not other health categories (with Wellness.com as the exception).
Furthermore, for the most part, none of their business models centers on creating a local healthcare advertising platform. This has enabled us to actually partner with some of our competitors in providing an advertising solution on their directories.
5. How has HealthCare.com been funded to date?
HealthCare.com announced that it had raised $6.1M in financing in June 2007. We have since raised a follow-on round with an undisclosed amount earlier this year.
6. What do you have coming soon that we should know about?
You will be seeing new distribution partners, especially as we roll out in the online newspaper channel. Stay tuned for those announcements. You will also continue to see improvements in our data and search capabilities.
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