Rumors are back suggesting Revolution Health is looking to merge with another company. Only this time, it’s with another health information portal: Everyday Health. And together, the companies believe they can finally supplant WebMD as the most trafficked site in that space.
According to the Washington Post, the companies are still engaging in negotiations and no firm plans have been agreed upon yet. But if an agreement is struck, they will move fast to get the deal done.
Revolution Health Network, which was founded by former AOL Chairman Steve Case, is currently the third-most popular health portal, according to the latest comScore numbers. The company serviced about 11 million visitors in July, while Everyday Health had 14.7 million visitors and WebMD had 17.2 million visitors during the same period.
If Revolution Health and Everyday Health merge, best estimates suggest the combined firm would surpass WebMD’s monthly visitors mark and supplant the well-known company as the leader in health information.
At the very least, the fact that its two main competitors are even talking should put WebMD on notice. In the past year alone, the online health information sector grew by 21 percent — more than four times as fast as the rest of the Web. Realizing that, there are more money-making opportunities than ever before for these companies and WebMD needs to ensure that it’s in a prime position to capitalize on that growth.
But how can it do that? Assuming Revolution Health and Everyday Health merge, WebMD doesn’t have too many options available if it wants to acquire another service and increase its presence online. The only other relevant sites in the space are AOL Health, About.com Health, and Yahoo Health, and there’s little doubt that WebMD wouldn’t be able to acquire any of those. It looks like it will need to “go it alone” if it wants to stay number one.
WebMD has yet to comment on the possibility of its two main competitors merging, but you can bet that it’s not happy to hear the news.
Beyond the power that Revolution Health will get from the merger, its content is simply superior and the site is better designed. I’ve never felt lost, overwhelmed, or misled on Revolution, whereas very often on WebMD I read interesting, but tangential articles and end up forgetting why I was there in the first place. Of course, this could just have a lot to do with how old WebMD is and the fact that Revolution Health is a 2.0 site–clean and uncluttered.
The Mayo Clinic has an excellent health site that everyone needs to bookmark.
Nice post Don, but the merger of these two companies is (as you point out) purely business. They are both doing the exact same thing with essentially the same content (Harvard Publications). I expect nothing new (other than ad sales) from this combination.
Maybe it’s just me— or perhaps the post-adrenaline rush from going through TC50 posts, but the health sector needs something new. For the past 10 years, we have loaded similar (often the exact same) medical content (there are only about six major suppliers) into one UI after another with nothing fundamentally new.
If the health sector is really growing at 4 times the rate of the Internet at large, shouldn’t we be making some breakthroughs?
I would like to see a merger where cutting-edge technology and capability are determinants, not just sales math.
“I expect nothing new (other than ad sales) from this combination”
It is about advertising and money: a merger would mean more eyeballs and more sales. It would mean more for “Revolution” than for “Everyday Health”
Of course, it would not mean much for the content quality –we have to remember that, for the three companies mentioned in the post, the contents is produced by writers with no medical training at all.
Yes, the content is “reviewed” by a few MDs, but if we stay close to reality, the “reviewers” or “Members of the Board” are mostly interested on the checks they regularly get for having their names somewhere on the sites.
Although incomplete [and tangential, as mentioned above,] these sites do provide an important service, far superior than the “medical” information most people get from television [ER, House, Bones, etc.] and popular magazines…
Holly M. Wagner MD
Walt,
In order to have the cutting edge technology in the space, we’ll need proof that models other than publishing work…and the capital to be able to build something at scale.
ZocDoc’s taken the first step in getting a reasonable A round from Khosla. Carol of course has the backing of Lemhi. But when smart people in the venture space like Ram Shriram publically throw up their hands, you know we have a dearth of early stage capital…and a huge opportunity for whomever proves out early models.
Wait, you think there could possibly be something else to Health 2.0 besides just loading bulk purchased disease info into a nice UI, tacking a ‘community’ on and sprinkling doctor written articles on top? Sacrilege!
I think the change you want is truly coming though. I take heart in companies like PatientsLikeMe, Sermo, and 23andMe that are solving real problems in this space. Look at PatientsLikeMe. They’re basically running enormous post-market drug trials and they’ve solved the moral hazards consuming this space by choosing a revenue model that doesn’t include advertising. Now that’s capability.
Having just built and launched the first phase of http://www.Doctor.com, I find this article interesting, as well as the subsequent discussion in previous comments. I agree with those who feel that despite its dramatic growth, the online health space has mostly devoid of true innovation.
There’s lots of redundant medical information and “thin” article content on the portal sites like RevolutionHealth and Everyday Health but too few valuable tools. Granted the “encyclopedia approach” these sites have taken will generate a lot of traffic but it’s not exactly pushing the envelope. Between WebMD, MayoClinic, and other players who’ve been in the space for many years, I think the bases are already pretty well covered.
Take doctor search, for example… Right now, “find a doctor” tools are in a pretty poor state of affairs. This is a no-brainer service that someone should have gotten right a long time ago. However, if you look at RevolutionHealth, for example, one can’t even filter search results by the health insurance plans doctors accept. That means that if you need to see a local doctor in your health insurance network (which a vast number of Americans do), you have to go through the list of doctors their search returns and call them one-by-one until you find one who takes your plan… Or you could just use Doctor.com (sorry, for the shameless plug but I do think we provide a valuable service).
On Doctor.com we’ve made the addition of health information a priority and are rapidly expanding this portion of our database every month. Currently, we have over a million listings of doctors and other health care providers and health insurance data for nearly half of them. This initial iteration of the site is solely focused on providing a definitive application that lets users quickly and easily find a doctor online. Queued up, we have a lot more genuinely innovative tools and services that should make some serious make some waves in this space when we bring them to market.
Our feeling is that great opportunities lie in (a) streamlining the way people find and connect with doctors and (b) in giving people access to valuable information about THEIR health. To plug a competitor of ours, I will say that ZocDoc is doing interesting things with online scheduling for dentists and doctors (although I think they face a lot of challenges in getting physicians to adopt their service). GoogleHealth and Microsoft HealthVault are trying to tackle the medical information challenge but both have a long way to go in my opinion. Both have a lot of potential but face an uphill battle in achieving the critical mass they need to gain momentum.
There is also a large opportunity for businesses that can provide easy-to-integrate technologies that help doctors and other health care providers free up time. Every doctor I know (and I know quite a few) feels harassed and overworked… even those who love their jobs. More importantly, nearly all have said they’d be happy to pay a reasonable price for tools to help lighten the load. We are working on several such tools and imagine that others are as well. I am amazed by how untapped this market is right now.
Ultimately, the next few years will be very interesting for players in the health information/services space and I expect to see a lot of shake up.
Regards,
A. Zimiles
General Manager
http://www.Doctor.com
Andrei - Another nice plug… Entrepreneurs like yourself actually think that throwing new technologies into the health and medical information space will lead us all to… nirvana? being super-healthy individuals? Think hot.
And of course, big bucks, mostly venture capital. Unfortunately this approach is destined to fail, as is the one based on search for doctors…
Remember that the approach that really works in real life is to ask your family MD for a referral is you need one. Second, most local hospitals have excellent referral systems that can be reached by phone and also online, listing all the doctors on their staff [already credentialed] with many details on their offices’ hours and locations, insurance plans accepted, etc. What is the “secret” to all this: all medical care is LOCAL –or regional, with the exception of highly specialized surgery, cancer treatments, etc.
Hello Holly,
Thanks for your feedback. I especially appreciate your comments considering you are an MD (or at least appear so from your previous post).
I completely agree with you that, for the individual, the most important point of access for health care and medical information will always be the medical professionals who’ve examined them in the flesh. No level of digital technology could ever possibly supplant this. This is one reason why we are working so hard on expanding the opportunities we provide our professional members. We want to spend more of their time with patients (or getting much needed R&R) and less time with paperwork.
With that said, I would argue that there are many cases where a person may not know where to begin when it comes to finding the right primary care physician, specialist, or alternative medicine practitioner.
What if you move to a new area? What if you change jobs and suddenly you are restricted to a different network of healthcare providers? What if suddenly you develop a severe health issue that requires visits to many specialists and second opinions? Having been in all of these scenarios myself, I can say that it’s not always as easy as one would think to get connected to the right network of health professionals. While your point about local hospitals is well-taken, I think the average person is far more likely to ask their friends/neighbors for recommendations (something we facilitate on Doctor.com) or simply to go online and google something like “top cardiologists in new york”. You’d be amazed how much traffic we get from individualized searches like that.
The way I see it, sites like ours are not designed to replace or compete with traditional means of developing a personal health network (did I just coin a new buzz term there ;)?)… Rather, we compliment traditional approaches like asking friends for recommendations , ringing the local hospital, or simply walking into a nearby doctor’s office.
People are only turning more and more to the web to find medical care (this is evidenced by the statistics provided in this article and our own organic traffic growth)… The way I see it, they can either be guided to a source that provides a cumbersome and frustrating experience (i.e. RevolutionHealth’s doctor search), or something more focused, elegant, and useful. The latter is what we’re endeavoring to provide with Doctor.com, although I realize we still have much to work on (the site is barely two months old).
If you have any ideas about how we can improve our services and do a better job of facilitating the sort of local connections you stressed in your post - please feel free to e-mail me at azimiles (at) doctor.com. Feedback from doctors like you is the probably the single most important factor in determining which features we ultimately bring to market.
Yes, nothing significantly different on either sites….just more money.
Actually, the combined company has more stuffs than just contents/article. Revolution Health has Personal Health Records, trackers, tools, groups/communities, ratings of drugs, ratings of doctor and hospitals, …
Good post and interesting comments.
I have to agree the combination brings no obvious innovation. Even though Revolution Health brings some different elements to the combination, I do not see anything in the list that cannot be found at hundreds of other health sites. Both sites have solid content— but again, this same licensed content can be found on hundreds of other health sites.
At http://www.freeMD.com we offer an application that emulates a physician function called symptom triage. I suspect no one who visits this link will have seen this before.
Most primary care physicians are aware of the triage process, because it is what they routinely do to determine urgency for care given a combination of symptoms and past medical history. FreeMD.com also processes numerical data, such as pulse, respiratory rate, blood pressure, temperature, serum glucose, BMI, and gestational age (pregnancy).
At the end of the process, FreeMD.com produces a highly personalized report that will:
1) Tell you if and when to seek physician care
2) Tell you what might be wrong (one or more conditions that should be ruled-out by a real physician evaluation)
3) Tell you where to seek care (ER, urgent care, MD office, drugstore clinic, etc.)
4) Tell you what tests might be ordered to evaluate your condition
5) What kind of doctor is appropriate to evaluate your condition (internal medicine, family practice, ENT, etc.)
6) Tell you what to do to care for yourself at home
7) Tell you what the warning signs to look out for so you know if your condition is worsening
I very much enjoy reading the TC blog. Congrats to Mike and Jason on TC50…..lots of very interesting and innovative new companies.
Stephen Schueler, MD
CEO, DSHI Systems, Inc.
What a shameless plug!!!
Your site needs a re-design as of yesterday: very amateurish and awkward to navigate.
The concept is just ok; hope that you do not think you are on the same league as Revolution, Web MD, etc.
Interesting discussion in the comments and thanks for sharing this article.
Anyone in the online health sector should take notice.
The article that I authored a few months ago at Seeking Alpha outlines what is missing in online health–not just new and innovative products (as have been pointed out), but a clear and meaningful ROI for advertisers.
http://seekingalpha.com/articl.....for-pharma
To say this potential merger is simply about money isn’t really accurate in my opinion. Revolution Health has failed. They are unable to generate meaningful revenue (thus the layoffs and now the hiring of Morgan Stanley to sell the company), and despite a well known founder (Steve Case) and a “whos who” board of directors they were unable to gain any meaningful traction with advertisers. Everyday Health has done a nice job of monetizing their network of mostly subscription websites but they too are not selling anything unique. Is more eyeballs looking at low cost CPM’s the wave of the future? I don’t think so. But in today’s world WebMD’s sales organization is still heads and tails in front of all others when it comes to monetizing eyeballs. Until there is significant disruption in the market via product innovation the pecking order (as judged by revenue) will likely remain the same in my opinion.
““who’s who” board of directors” –Carly Fiorina, aka ‘the kiss of death’ was on the board… [ coincidence? ] I think not.
“via product innovation” –What is it? better health and medical information?
I was at one of the early meetings at “Revolution” in Georgetown, Washington DC, where the then ‘chief of content’ firmly stated that they would not hire any trained physicians to provide or supervise their main site’s content, although, yes, it was all about health and medical information: they would have instead in-house ‘medical writers’ and re-package articles from the Mayo and Cleveland Clinics, etc.
Money was not a problem at the time, since they had more than $400M in cash, from Steve Case own money and from investors such as the Carlyle Group.
On a similar thread, I’m hoping for health care to become a more convenient, less painlful affair. As a 20something currently without health insurance, Hello Health ( https://www.hellohealth.com ) is a new company in Brooklyn, NY taking steps to bridge the divide with the brilliant new software, Myca ( http://www.myca.com/ ). I believe *that* is where the innovations lie in online health information: accessibility to your own records and and doctors that respond to email.