Just when we thought things were calming down in the world of Health 2.0, it’s kicking off. WebMD has been watching Everyday Health take over its spot as top Health site ranking in the ComScore rankings (cue angry diatribe from those who don’t believe Comscore, and explanations from those who think they understand what Comscore is up to). They’ve also presumably been watching as MedHelp.org went from nowhere to close to 10m visits a month (WebMD claims 60m users but Comscore says closer to 24M).
Yesterday came WebMD’s response—a serious upgrade of their community features. Over the past two weeks they’ve soft launched Health Exchange and have migrated their bulletin boards over to the new platform. On Health Exchange there’ll be lots of things familiar to Health 2.0 mavens—expert advice in the Forums from leading medical centers, the ability to tip, share resources, vote on opinions and much more.
The new launch is probably a bit of welcome change of pace for WebMD which spent the last couple of weeks getting spanked for a not-too-objective quiz on its site suggesting that everyone had depression and needed Cymbalta. Whether the new Exchange is really different to the previous bulletin boards, which weren’t as vibrant as those of its competitors, remains to be seen. But overall it shows that the world of Health 1.0 is changing and that the grandaddy of online health content sites is really going to be featuring user-generated content from now on.
Categories: Matthew Holt
Went and did a deep dive into the WebMD Exchange, it is a mess. Not hat it is all bad, did find a few positives, but negatives far outweighed those. Really quite surprising that a company with so much cash on hand and one of the largest consumer health sites out there did such a p*ss poor job. http://chilmarkresearch.com/2010/03/09/webmd-social-media-not/
What we’re seeing here is the expansion of consumer Web 2.0 business models & strategy in healthcare.
There is strong potential here for winner-take-all (or most) business models with strong network effects — like ebay, Facebook, Twitter.
The goal for entrants at early stages is to build out the network and hopefully become THE dominant application. Twitter has a valuation of $1B + but doesn’t have any revenues yet.
It’s not clear at what level the “network” (or community) there will be winners/losers. One way to look at this is that WebMD or MedHelp become dominant companies.
Another way to look at this is as competition among discrete patient communities — e.g., diabetes, AIDS, arthritis — with different companies (or organizations) developing dominance in different niches. This strikes me as more probable.
Interesting times ahead.
Group visits are good for smoking cessation and general education and support type things, but they cannot replace regular visits, even for pregnancy. I doubt anybody would agree to undergo examination in a group setting.
This post got me thinking about how health 2.0 is generally assumed to be web-based, but there are flesh and blood versions as well that trade on exactly the same dynamic with user/patient participation, asking questions, providing experiences to other patients, etc.
For example, some recent press has focused on the idea of group office visits (such as for pregnancy, though chronic disease management fits the model nicely). A physician could have a 2 hour session with 10 people where each one gets 2 hours worth of information, gets to listen to the experiences of others in similar situations, gets to ask questions, etc. They interact both with the physician and other patients simultaneously.
This can easily scale up if insurers pay for group sessions in a way that makes sense.