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HEALTH2.0/TECH: And in your Health2.0 moment of zen

I’ll be at an IFTF meeting today where they too are talking about Health2.0 but in the much wider context of a shift in bio-citizenry. Hey, they’ve got way high fallotin’ since my days there as a grunge health care consultant in the 1990s. Of course if I didn’t plug the Health2.0–User Generated Healthcare conference in this post, you’d be disappointed, right?

But one interesting nugget arrived in my email courtesy of Today in E-Health Business. Comscore thinks that the “newbies” in the consumer health space are growing—look especially at Healthline’s increases.

More consumers are turning to the Internet to learn about various health issues, with some smaller Web sites gaining traction in the booming online health information category, says a new study by comScore, Inc., a company that measures Web usage. During the first quarter of 2007, an average of 55.3 million monthly U.S. visitors accessed online health information resources, according to the study released May 21. This figure represents 31% of the total U.S. Internet audience, an increase of 12% from the same period last year, it adds. WebMD Health led the online health information category with an average of 17.1 million unique visitors per month in the first quarter (up 25% from the year-ago period), followed by NIH.gov with 9.8 million visitors (up 8%), MSN Health with 8.1 million visitors (up 1%), and Yahoo! Health with 6.7 million visitors (up 83%). Several smaller players also have grown significantly in the category, the study finds. For example, Healthline.com attracted an average of 2.7 million visitors in the first quarter, up 269% from the same period last year, while QualityHealth.com jumped 114% to 2.6 million visitors in the quarter, compared with the same period a year ago, according to comScore. Meanwhile, recent market entrant RevolutionHealth.com has seen its traffic more than double from 239,000 visitors in January to 486,000 visitors in March. “While the larger and more established health portals are continuing to grow, the category is being shaken up by a few upstarts,” says Carolina Petrini, vice president of pharmaceutical solutions at comScore.

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