Webware

Health care product giant Johnson & Johnson announced that it has completed its acquisition of HealthMedia, a company that specializes in online health counseling and Web interventions.

HealthMedia is a unique property on the Web. It combines its technology and behavioral science to emulate a health coach in a browser. The site's suite of services provides automated coaching for topics on wellness, disease management, behavioral health, and medication adherence that the company claims will help reduce health bills. Because of that, Johnson & Johnson believes the addition of HealthMedia to its properties will improve the company's standing in the health care community.

"It is exciting for Johnson & Johnson to establish a new business platform to offer customers meaningful products and services focused on wellness and prevention that reduce health care costs, and at the same time, deliver new growth for our company," William C. Weldon, Johnson & Johnson CEO, said in a statement. "Global health care systems, including governments, employers, payers, and individuals, are seeking new solutions to more effectively manage spiraling costs of care. Our establishment of a Wellness & Prevention platform recognizes our conviction that a comprehensive solution must begin long before the onset of illness, and that investing in wellness and prevention now can avoid more costly health care expenses later."

HealthMedia will maintain its offices in Michigan and will not be forced to lay off employees or engage in any management restructuring.

HealthCare.com, an online directory of health care providers that competes in the so-called health 2.0 space with companies such as OrganizedWisdom, announced on Thursday that it has acquired BrokersWeb, a targeted, performance-based online-advertising firm that caters to health insurance brokers, for an undisclosed sum. With the acquisition, it gains control of BrokersWeb's consumer health insurance search engine, Health Insurance Finders.

"The acquisition of BrokersWeb strengthens our presence and fits within HealthCare.com's mission to help consumers make better health care decisions," said Matias de Tezanos, founder and chief executive of HealthCare.com. "From a business standpoint, the acquisition brings together a leading media property and a proprietary monetization platform that HealthCare.com will be able to expand."

BrokersWeb provides more than 250 health industry advertisers with pay-per-click advertising generated from health insurance queries. The company allows advertisers to bid for placement in its paid listings and provides them with return-on-investment analytics to help them make informed ad campaign decisions.

According to company spokesman Jose Vargas, Health Insurance Finders will continue to operate as a standalone site, though some of its features will help enrich HealthCare.com.

Genetic analysis start-up 23andMe, known for its star-studded "spit parties" and a controversial investment from Google, announced Thursday the debut of a new initiative to bring together women who have been affected by breast cancer or who may be genetically at risk.

October is the 23rd annual National Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

Using its Web-based social network, 23andMe hopes to "reach out to, and build a community around, women who have encountered breast cancer, thereby increasing the scientific understanding of the inherited aspects of a disease that affects 200,000 newly diagnosed individuals per year." Women who purchase the $399 testing kits will have the option to participate in surveys, and the start-up's research arm, called "23andWe," will build a community for the swapping of knowledge, advice, and support.

Representatives from 23andMe said that the project does not yet have any external research organizations as partners, and remains "primarily a social-networking community" at the time. The genetics community has been reluctant to embrace consumer DNA-analysis companies, and the state of California asked 23andMe, along with other companies in the same field, to stop selling tests until they could be fully compliant with health regulations.

At the end of August, 23andMe announced that California authorities had granted it a license to continue selling its tests. In a blog post, 23andMe's founders described the agreement as "only the start of the dialogue between regulators and genomics companies that offer direct-to-consumer services."

This post was updated at 1:04 p.m. PT to clarify the state of 23andMe's negotiations with the state of California.

There are some big new names backing ZocDoc, a start-up that lets you book doctor's appointments online (currently just in New York). Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has contributed an undisclosed amount to the company, as has Bezos Expeditions, the investment firm run by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos.

In August, the company announced a $3 million Series A funding round led by Khosla Ventures, the firm created by Sun Microsystems founder Vinod Khosla. The Bezos and Benioff investments are considered contributions to that round.

The New York-based ZocDoc currently employs 12 people and said that there were nearly 20,000 medical appointments available for booking in the month of September.

Khosla Ventures, the venture capital firm launched in 2004 by Sun Microsystems founder Vinod Khosla, has led a $3 million Series A round for ZocDoc, a service for locating and booking doctors' appointments online.

ZocDoc is sort of like a cross between Yelp and Lifebooker--but with its focus on physicals, not facials. Members can search for nearby doctors, filter by insurance plan matches, find out what other members have had to say about them, and book the appointments through the site. Currently, it only serves the New York boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn, but has plans to expand nationwide--that's what the funding is for.

"ZocDoc is addressing a real need in health care," Khosla said in a release Monday. He won't be joining the start-up's board of directors, but his partner David Weiden will. "The Internet has the potential to fundamentally improve access to care, and the company has gained initial traction towards this long-term vision," he said in the statement.

Plenty of much bigger names have been getting on the online health care bandwagon, but most of them have been focusing on medical records, not appointment booking.

Update at 12:19 PM PT: This story was updated to reflect the World Privacy Forum's position on PHRs in general.

Google is set to announce on Thursday that it will be using the Cleveland Clinic hospital in Cleveland, Ohio as the pilot site for its new personal health records initiative.

The Cole Eye Institute (foreground) and the taller Crile Building, which is the flagship facility of the Cleveland Clinic.

(Credit: Cleveland Clinic)

Between 1,500 and 10,000 patients at the Cleveland, Ohio, facility will participate in the project's test run, volunteering to have their medical records transferred to their Google accounts. The hospital already keeps electronic records for over 100,000 patients in an internal system called MyChart, but when those personal health records, or PHRs, are shared with Google, patients will be able to use them outside of the Cleveland Clinic. Included in the data will be prescription information, medical histories, and details about conditions and allergies.

"Patients are more proactively managing their own healthcare information," Dr. C. Martin Harris, the Cleveland Clinic's chief information officer, said in a statement. "At Cleveland Clinic, we strive to participate in and help to advance the national dialogue around a more efficient and effective national healthcare system."

"We believe patients should be able to easily access and manage their own health information," Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search projects and user experience, said in the same statement. "We chose Cleveland Clinic as one of the first partners to pilot our new health offering because as a provider, they already empower their patients by giving them online tools that help them manage their medical records online and coordinate care with their doctors." Additionally, Cleveland Clinic president and CEO Delos M. Cosgrove is a member of Google's Health Advisory Council.

Google isn't the only tech titan looking to change the healthcare industry. AOL founder Steve Case has launched a new company, Revolution Health; InterActiveCorp has invested in several health-related start-ups; and Microsoft has been working on a medical record service.

But all these "health 2.0" initiatives will inevitably raise privacy concerns, and critics of such projects have already begun to make themselves heard. The World Privacy Forum, which has highlighted concerns about medical identity theft in the past, has already issued a report voicing concerns about third-party PHR systems that aren't covered by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA), which has been in effect since 1996 and requires individuals to be notified when a party other than a patient's doctor wants to access confidential medical data.

Not only is security an issue, the nonprofit has said, so is the likelilhood that marketers and other corporate entities will be able to exploit otherwise confidential data. The World Privacy Forum has not taken a specific stance on Google's new project or on others like Microsoft's.

Google is of particular concern to some privacy advocates because the company already has so much data about its users.

"While PHRs may have some laudable goals," the report by privacy consultant Robert Gellman read, "they are also a tempting target for companies or others that want to evade whatever privacy protections remain in the health care system in order to make a profit."

First AOL, next a revolution.

AOL co-founder Steve Case announced Wednesday his online health and wellness company, Revolution Health Group, has acquired HealthTalk, pushing his company into the ranks of the second-largest health information site on the Net.

The deal is designed to bolster Revolution's offerings beyond the health and wellness category and into the area of supplying content on chronic conditions. The acquisition marks yet more activity in the online health care arena, which has seen not only mergers but also the birth of medical and health-related search engines, according to American Medical News. There's also been a surge in the number of Web sites relating to health, well-being and care, such as Caring.com.

HealthTalk's site covers a range of chronic illnesses, from rheumatoid arthritis to Alzheimer's to cancers to colitis. The multimedia site, which includes original content with medical experts and interactive programming, draws more than 1 million unique visitors per month. The site is accessed by more than 500,000 members, who receive targeted health information.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Revolution Health Group, with its latest acquisition, reaches more than 12 million unique visitors a month, putting it behind only the WebMD Health Network, which generates 40.8 million unique visitors per month.

HealthTalk will operate as a site within the Revolution Health Network, which includes CarePages.com and RevolutionHealth.com. The Revolution Network is also affiliated with drugstore.com and SparkPeople.com.

It's fairly easy to tell if a meal is bad for you using basic nutritional knowledge. The idea I think is best explained through a reference to a Simpsons episode wherein Homer goes on the "clear" diet, eating only (greasy) foods that turn things like napkins--and, incidentally, entire walls--translucent. In the real world we have nutritionalists, and an interesting Web service called MyFoodPhone that is best explained as a weight-loss and nutritional-education program slash social network.

The premise is simple: Just take photos to log each meal you've eaten and send them to the service via MMS. These entries can be added using your phone, or by logging them on the Web site. You can then monitor your progress on a chart, which can also contain biometric data if you put in the time to enter it on a daily basis.

From there the service branches off in two directions: community, and a paid expert service. With the community section you get your own team. It's a small group composed of other users who are tracking their meals and goals. It's essentially an online support group designed to make you feel responsible for your eating habits.

The other end, and the far more interesting one, is the paid service. Ten bucks a month gets you your own nutritionalist who will go over your habits and give you feedback, including recommendations on what you could and should be doing better. The paid service also gives you access to nutritional videos, which have been hand-picked by your adviser for you.

What's fascinating is the expansion beyond this service into the medical field. Parent company Myca is working on two other services (DoctorPhone and BabyPhone) aimed at helping people get medical advice using their camera phones. In theory, you'd be able to call and ask a question, or take a picture of something you're concerned about (use your imagination on that one), and get hooked up to a nurse or doctor to talk you through it. According to an article by Business 2.0 Magazine, Myca is working with the insurance industry to get these services covered by people's pre-existing health plans, which is fairly attractive assuming your current health-care provider doesn't have good phone-nursing services.

Keep track of your nutritional needs with MyFoodPhone's visual tools.

(Credit: MyFoodPhone.com)

WebMD's symptom analysis is nice.

Although you can't singlehandedly fix the woes of national health care that are spotlighted in the movie Sicko, many free Web sites at least put a bit more power in your hands to manage personal wellness or a medical crisis. Just share your data wisely.

WebMD (a Webware 100 winner) offers videos, virtual support groups, quizzes, blogs, doctor lookups, and a spiffy symptom checker. Look up drugs by a pill's color, imprint or shape. WebMD won't spam you, but as with its competitors, if you subscribe to e-mail updates about some unappetizing ailment, then prepare for related tidbits in your in-box. It's too bad that some ads, like those for toothpaste, are hard to distinguish from the rest of WebMD.

Although WebMD offers more activities, HealthAtoZ is also helpful, letting you chat with nurses and create a personal health record with feeds from your insurance claims. But community features, blogs, and videos are lacking.

RevolutionHealth pivots around a treatment portfolio you create in addition to blogging and rating doctors and hospitals. You can pose questions anonymously to the community. Talking to experts about care and insurance costs $129 annually, or is free for a month.

A newer site, TauMed (also here), enables you to create a medical library of clips from the Web, as well as a Health Space profile to add doctors and collect "friends." The question-and-answer service is novel--although it lacks a stealth mode in case you're curious about something blush-worthy.

The ad-free, clean, and less peppy FamilyDoctor and HealthFinder are excellent and encyclopedic. You can dig deeper into the latest medical studies via the National Library of Medicine's Pub Med and Medline, which also offers drug interaction lookups.

For health care quests, social networking takes on a deeper dimension beyond collecting friends, songs and party plans on MySpace or Twitter and the like. Ill people from around the world can compare symptoms anonymously online, share suffering or healing tales, and tip off each other about treatments.

PatientsLikeMe hosts support communities for people dealing with ALS, Parkinson's disease, or multiple sclerosis. You can create quick graphs that track prescription regimens and symptoms. Hopefully similar tools are in the works for a wider array of conditions. I like PatientsLikeMe's Answer Network, a Q&A service that delivers data in novel ways. For instance, bar charts display other members' top reasons for discontinuing specific drugs.

Patients Like Me helps you track complex drug dosages and symptoms.

In addition to linking you with strangers, the Internet provides gathering spaces for family and friends. I've used theStatus, which partners with hospitals, to see from San Francisco how a dear family friend in Ohio fared after heart surgery. TheStatus feels like it sounds--a no-nonsense check-in service for the straight dope on an urgent medical situation. You can leave well wishes, too. BabyStatus is new.

I have another close family friend whose ongoing medical care requires regular attention from people in far-flung places. We tried to set up a Web-based spreadsheet to track our visits via Google Docs & Spreadsheets (more here), but only the few geeks among us could get past the awkward document-sharing steps.

We turned next to CarePages, which was built for our purpose. But its colorful design somehow didn't feel appropriate for tracking the care of a retired mathematics professor who would kick back with paperbacks about string theory in his free time. But CarePages seems a good fit for the million families, particularly those with young children, it has served. Opening a page is uncomplicated. There are sections for pediatric cancer, brain injury, and much more. CarePages is now part of RevolutionHealth.

Similarly, CaringBridge steps you through selecting one of several age-appropriate designs for a patient. You can share photo galleries, a guest book and a journal. But while I picked privacy options, CaringBridge displayed my password in clear type on its site. At least nobody was looking over my shoulder. Security sin aside, I can see why the nonprofit site's ease of use has led to success for more than a decade with some 64,000 patient sites.

With any highly personalized service dealing with sensitive topics, security should be paramount. It's hard to peek inside these sites without registering. You might want to set up a separate e-mail account for medical matters first, and never use your real name as a user ID.

The Truste seal marking WebMD, FamilyDoctor, HealthAtoZ, and CarePages shows that they use the same encryption as bank sites (so does theStatus). I like WebMD's privacy policy best for telling you how you can ask to yank your data from its servers.

All of these Web sites pledge not to send all of your data with third parties--except for John Law. No patient-client privilege here. If you are hiding a medical condition that you don't want unearthed by a search warrant, then you have the nearly impossible option of accessing these sites with a PC and IP address separate from anything else you do in life, also while using strong security software. That's still no guarantee that you won't leave personal cookie crumbs.

On that note, wouldn't it be nice if you could find what's inside all of your medical files from over the years, lickety-split, just like Googling yourself? What if you could connect that information to your genetic code? Such dreams of convenience would trigger obvious privacy nightmares. As Web-based health care tools become easier and richer to use, striking the balance between approachability and security will become trickier.