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If my hunch proves right, the site likely to benefit most is WebMD. Thanks to heavy marketing, WebMD boasts 5 million visitors a month, trailing only OnHealth.com (which WebMD is about to acquire) and America Online's health channel. To be sure, many experts question whether WebMD can deliver on its ambition of creating a seamless connection between doctors, patients, hospitals, insurers -- in short, every player in the health-care arena -- and streamlining health care in a way that actually controls costs while improving quality. But while WebMD may never meet that goal -- or live up to the $10 billion valuation Wall Street placed on the company last year -- there's still a lot for consumers to like about its site. WebMD's dream is to let patients log on to their doctor's WebMD-powered homepage, schedule an office visit, ask their doctor questions by e-mail, check their insurance coverage, and get the results of any lab work performed. But these ambitions have been hampered by the site's inability to recruit insurance companies and doctors into its network. If you click on the site's "My Health Plan" feature, designed to let members of a health maintenance organization or health plan handle such tasks as choosing a primary-care physician and checking the status of a claim, you discover that the only participating HMO is Humana. The information on doctors isn't much better: Most doctors -- not yet convinced that the Web allows the give-and-take essential to proper medical care -- have resisted signing up. So WebMD's vision of patients trekking to their doctor's homepage hasn't taken wing. Even the site's "Find a Doctor" feature is a disappointment: My neighbor, an Atlanta hand surgeon, isn't listed. And my college chum, a radiologist, is still listed as practicing in North Carolina even though he moved to Virginia roughly a year ago. COMPREHENSIVE TREATMENT. Despite such problems, WebMD is still far better than most other consumer-oriented health sites. WebMD has far more information to study than rivals like DrKoop.com or CBS's HealthWatch site, and presents it all in a breezy tone. And while the site isn't quite as racy as OnHealth -- which has the attitude of a women's magazine ("What to do about Vaginal Dryness?" blurts one headline) -- it's still well-designed and easy to navigate. Interactive calculators and quizzes help you determine everything from how long it'll take to burn off the calories in that cheesecake you're about to wolf down to whether you're tubby before the fork even comes out. There's also streaming video programming from the Health Network cable channel. But the ultimate measure of any health site is the quality of the advice it doles out, and here WebMD measures up. The site's handling of most major diseases is better than that of rival health portals and, in some instances, better than you'll find at sites that specialize in a particular disease. Consider WebMD's "treatment" of rheumatoid arthritis (RA). The introductory screen -- which describes RA as a "disease [that] tends to stop by itself" -- nearly stopped a close relative of mine, who suffers from RA, dead in her tracks. But once she looked past that screen, she found a raft of useful information, created not just by WebMD's team of 80 medical journalists but also aggregated from other sources like Well-Connected.com and the Harvard Health Letter. There's a discussion of juvenile arthritis, an affliction that's too often ignored, and reports on new research suggesting the role of genetics in arthritis. The section also explores not just the new class of "wonder drugs" such as Enbrel but also the experimental use of antibiotic treatments like Menocin. The only quibble: WebMD makes no mention that I could find of Meloxicam, the latest wonder drug to be approved by the FDA for treating RA. WebMD did a better job covering RA than did other sites. The Mayo Clinic's Health Oasis service provides only two articles specifically on rheumatoid arthritis. But the bigger disappointment was the site of the vaunted Arthritis Foundation, a leading nonprofit advocacy group. Surprisingly, the content found at the Arthritis Foundation isn't much better than WebMD's. And the foundation's site seems more intent on impressing members with its lobbying efforts in Washington and promoting goods sold through its "Arthritis Store," including over-the-counter products like BenGay, to which the foundation has licensed its seal-of-approval. To its credit, WebMD doesn't use its editorial content as a direct come-on to pitch products. In fact, most of the banner advertising we saw while surfing through the RA channel was for unrelated merchandise. PRIVACY ALERT. Much of WebMD is customizable. You can configure your Home Page to deliver news on topics of interest, sign up for any of 60 e-mail newsletters on topics like hepatitis, and even create "My Health Record," which lets you organize and track your family's personal medical information for access anywhere, anytime. Of course, an issue for anyone creating their own health record on any site is privacy: If you're uncomfortable with strangers getting your credit-card number, imagine how you'd feel if marketers somewhere knew your medical history. To its credit, WebMD is one of the few commercial health sites that has had its privacy policy reviewed and audited by Truste, an independent group that monitors privacy policies of Web sites. WebMD acknowledges that it uses cookies to track users' movement through the site and that its advertisers may also use cookies when users click on their ads. What's more, WebMD also notes that it provides personal data to vendors and suppliers helping WebMD improve the operation of its site. While WebMD says it will "attempt to require that each of these Vendors not further use or disclose your Personal Information...we cannot guarantee their compliance with these restrictions." Yikes. Legalese perhaps, but it may be a turn-off to anyone already wary of being hacked while on the Web, or simply having evidence of their most private problems turned over to the online direct-marketing colossus. If you're willing to trust WebMD on privacy, the site offers some value to the health-conscious. And that's particularly true if you're a hypochondriac boomer like me. Foust is the manager of Business Week's Atlanta bureau |
