This Healthline profile is continued from page three.
What kind of improvements should we expect from Healthline in the next six months to a year?
We launched our beta website in mid-October, 2005, and will be spending the next 6 months to a year continuing to refine, improve and expand the index and taxonomy, to incorporate user feedback and suggestions into our presentation layer, to add new, high quality medical content, including the original YourDoctor.com articles, to improve visibility into the results that we provide (e.g., showing accreditation), to expand the resources that we search and list in context, and to continually refine and improve the search results that we return.
What about long term plans for Healthline?
There isn't a whiteboard in our offices that doesn't have a list of things we'd like to do in the long-term. It's important to note that it's not just the Internet that is fundamentally changing the way consumers learn about and manage their health - it's the seismic changes in the U.S. healthcare system and the graying "baby boomer" population that is forcing the need for a more transparent and frictionless health information marketplace.
More and more of us than ever before are picking up a larger share of our healthcare tab, and the sweeping changes in employer healthcare programs, to a self- serve defined contribution framework from the old, paternalistic defined benefit plan, is leading the charge.
There is an explosion in the number of treatment options and life sciences breakthroughs, yet doctors have less time than ever before to both keep abreast of these advances and spend enough time with their patients. Providing the right information, and the right resources, at the right time, is central to our brand proposition.
Ultimately, Healthline is perfectly aligned to complement the inevitable, if not very long in coming, personal, and portable, electronic medical record.
What are the top five reasons a searcher should use Healthline?
- We focus on searching and returning results from only high-quality health and healthcare websites (others, like WebMD for example, only provide their own proprietary information; we search the top health websites to provide more information to help users make important health decisions); search on cold and you will see only results that have to do with the common cold, not the cold war or Cold Play.
- We have an extensive medical domain expertise; from the navigation tools, like HealthMaps, to our terminology database, to the way in which we understand the inter-relationship between concepts, we use medical knowledge, not query analysis, to help guide the search experience.
- Speaking of HealthMaps; our HealthMaps provide an intuitive and easy-to-use interface to navigate through very complex health conditions, and enable a quicker path from search to discovery.
- Healthline's topically focused Health Channels give another type of user, the browser, the ability to find information and have it presented in context, complete with HealthMaps, related articles, news and suggested query terms to launch a search for more information.
- Member tools, like Healthline Save from Anywhere and Healthline Search from Anywhere, and the ability to build community and share (and learn from others) experiences via ratings and reviews.
Wendy's Healthline Summary: I found Healthline to be an exemplary medical information search engine. It's easy to use, the information is relevant, and the search process is simple and intuitive. Medical information on the Web can be tricky to find, especially trustworthy medical information, and I believe Healthline does a stellar job of editing and presenting appropriate medical information that you can use.
