HealthyConcerns.com

What do you want from a health site?

I came across this brief post about the new Revolution Health site/company over a The Health Care Blog.

What interested me most was something in the comments:

"I respect what Steve Case is trying to do but I would have thought he'd learned the lessons of AOL. It's simple: users aren't as interested in content portals as they are in well-designed tools and focused destinations. [snip]

Similarly, any patient or physician savvy enough to use the Internet to manage their health interests will seek out the best solution for each problem. That translates to separate vendors for health information search, medical reference, personal health records, physician communications, patient social networking, medical products and services shopping, etc. Trying to be everything for everyone is a recipe for disaster."

I'm mulling over this comment, and not sure I agree. I do think there is value to having a place you go that you count on the source for other places to go...if that makes sense.

For example,that's what we try to do with BlogHer. We do have original content and forums and such, but we also do a lot of pointing our members to other great writing by women bloggers across the blogosphere. To us it is not time spent on our web site (or "stickiness" as it's sometimes called) that would be the greatest measure of succeeding at our mission, but rather if we could measure how many people actually clicked to another woman's blog directly from our site. (Don't have a name for that metric.)

So, if Revolution Health seeks to be the first place you go when looking for health-related information, not the only place you go, I think it could be successful.

What do you think?

The media and medical malpractice

I hate to jump on the "blame the media" bandwagon...which is pretty much the default position in so many walks of online life, from the political sphere to the anthropological, but Joe Paduda seems to be pointing us towards yet another reason to point our fingers: the media hypes up the impact of medical malpractice suits on the overal cost of healthcare in America. I know from some limited conversations I've had with a disgruntled doctor friend, that he brought up more angrily that his income was artificially limited by working with insurance companies than he brought up his malpractice insurance.

So, is it true for the average doctor (not an OB/GYN, not a brain surgeon etc.) that this doesn't put the squeeze on them like we've been told?

Even more than the over-emphasis on the personal impact of medical malpractice has probably been the over emphasis on the policy impact. Are politicians spending their time complaining about this issue, so they don't have to actually turn around and get something done on health care reform?

Cynical Me says "But, of course!"