HealthContentAdvisors

MyOptumHealth Consumer Health & Wellness Portal Launches

• Posted December 4th 2008
• by Janice

In launching myOptumHealth.com OptumHealth, the health and wellness division of UnitedHealth Group, clearly believes that producing their own open Web portal for consumers is a better bet than serving as a sponsor for the many consumer health portals that currently exists.  Having their own site, which rivals leading consumer health portals such as Revolution Health, HealthCentral, and WebMD, doesn’t preclude United’s advertising on other sites that compete with myOptumHealth, but the statement is loud and clear that they believe that controlling their own site has merits above and beyond sponsoring other sites.

OptumHealth was already in the business of providing private health portals for employer clients, so the R&D for design and content architecture for myOptumHealth will be broadly leveraged.  Also, OptumHealth can provide unique content about best practices for health & wellness management programs that it extracts from its experience in offering wellness services and its parent’s experience in offering health insurance.  And, even though they chose to build and control their own site, they are not trying to create all the content or features in-house.  OptumHealth is partnering with Healthline Networks for search technology and advertising utilities, and they are licensing some of the content from reputable third-party sources.

Although the site looks a lot like the other consumer health portals, the purpose of myOptumHealth has some different goals than the media-owned sites.  myOptumHealth does include advertising, but it will also serve as a lead-generator for UnitedHealth and OptumHealth’s services, as well as a test bed for its private portal business.  This multi-faceted business model has some key advantages over the primarily ad-supported model of the consumer media health sites.  Furthermore, by creating their own consumer site, OptumHealth has diverted a potential source of advertising dollars from the consumer media health sites.