By MATTHEW HOLT

Gábor Gyarmati has been running health care web sites in Hungary for longer than you might imagine. I suspect that many of you reading this don’t know much about Hungary and those of you who went to high school in America probably can’t find it on the map (stop it—you cynical Brit!), but what’s going on there is very interesting. Gábor will be presenting at Health 2.0 Europe on April 6–7 in Paris, but I did an IM interview with him last week to give you a preview.

Matthew Holt says: Gabor, you’ve been working in online health for several years doing market research and running consumer and physician websites. Can you tell me how you got started?

Gábor says: We have started our health and pharmaceutical research company, Szinapszis in 1998 that was the first of its kind in Hungary. We collected a lot of information about our market, patients, physicians, about their health and prescription choices. We found about 5 years ago that a “new media”, the Internet, appeared as a communication tool in healthcare and pharma marketing but at that time it was extremely weak, only a few physicians used it and less than 10 percent of the patients but we saw a very strong and fast increase in it. As our other companies did marketing communication projects, we knew that we have to this new tool as well although it is not known enough.Continue reading…