Feeling under the weather? At the nexus of Internet entrepreneurship and the health-care revolution is America's Doctor Online, where you can have a friendly, but mutually anonymous, keyboard-style chat with a physician (free, live, 24 hours a day) and get a reference -- if you desire -- to the nearest hospital that happens to be one of the site's paying sponsors. Before long, you'll be able to buy discount health equipment and nonprescription supplies for such conditions as diabetes, says Jeffrey Lefko, the company's executive vice-president for sales and marketing and a long-time hospital administrator. The one-year-old company has been on America Online since last September, but it made its debut on the Web last week.

The company's founder, Dr. Scott Rikin, is a Baltimore internal medicine specialist who got the idea from hearing patients say such things as, "I didn't want to call you last night, so I went online and typed in 'asthma' and got 2,000 matches," according to Lefko. So who at www.americasdoctor.com will ease your anxiety about that scaly eczema at 2 a.m.? One of 120 doctors who are paid $60 to $70 an hour but who aren't practicing online medicine, Lefko stresses: "They're more like health librarians."

The company just attracted $4 million in venture capital from Tullis-Dickerson & Co. in Connecticut. In a press release, the VC firm said it was attracted to the company's revenue model, which doesn't depend on advertising. Hospital sponsors pay from $1,000 to $15,000 a month, says Lefko, depending on size and other criteria. That certainly sounds like a more promising way to make money than banner ads. Now, about my cough, doc.

By Julia Lichtblau in New York
julia_lichtblau@businessweek.com