HealthContentAdvisors

Needed: Guided Navigation for Health Information Search

• Posted February 3rd 2010
• by Janice

There has been a lively dialogue occurring on the e-patients.net site this past week about how Google and Microsoft Bing display search results for health care queries.  Google recently introduced a special result listing that provides links to Mayo Clinic, ADAM, WebMD and MedlinePlus when users type in a common health condition as their search term.  For example, type in “hypertension” in the Google search box and the first listing in the search results will look like this:

Hypertension
Google Health   Mayo Clinic   Medline Plus   WebMD
	Hypertension is the term used to describe high blood pressure. Blood pressure readings are measured in millimeters of mercury (mmHg) and usually given as two numbers. For example, 120 over 80 (written as … www.google.com/health

The thread on e-patients.net was initiated by Susannah Fox, Associate Director, Digital Strategy at Pew Internet Research and so far has elicited 73 comments about Google’s policy of providing special placement for these four specialty health sites.  Further comments on the post focused on the inability of  existing consumer health portals, aggregators, and search engines in guiding patients to information sources that may be more relevant to them. I highly recommend a thorough reading of Susannah’s post and the subsequent comments.

I contributed the following comments: “At this point, the big search engines focus on the broadest topics and Mayo, ADAM, WebMD and MedlinePlus are good sources for basic info on diseases and conditions. But, the common complaint I hear about these resources is that they are too broad, not deep enough, too removed from the current needs of the patient, and certainly not geographically specific.”  Susannah wisely brought up the topic of how useful it would be to offer more guidance to people who are seeking more specific reliable information in their health-related query.  She asks “I wonder if curated search results are the answer to the ongoing debate over information quality?”

It may be difficult to offer “pre-curated” health information that suits everyone’s needs because of the vast array of queries and the disparate number of sources that exists.  The ‘big 3′ consumer health portals, WebMD, EveryDay Health[ii], and HealthCentral already serve as curators to the content they make available under their umbrellas.  But, these sites share many of the same mile-wide, inch-deep characteristics of the previously mentioned sites.  Even though there are some patient communities represented on these consumer health portals, it is often difficult to find the relevant community and relevant information buried in a post.

The discoverability problems in consumer health search relates to the early-stage of the health content product life cycle.  Some online patient communities may have existed for a long time, but most are relatively new.  Because many are small and specialized, it is unlikely they will ever achieve sufficient PageRank in Google’s relevancy algorithm to be listed on the first couple of search results pages on Google.

As social networking and other factors that drive the demand for healthcare information matures, there will be more demand for services that guide users through the process of researching, communicating, and recording health information.  Who will be the likely winners in the race to provide guided navigation to health information?  There are roles for EHR/PHR vendors, content companies (i.e., publishers), patient community sites, pharma and other vendors, providers, and payer organizations to create, distribute and sponsor health content. I expect to see a growing number of licensing and other content sharing deals between these health industry stakeholders in the coming years.  And there will always be a role for aggregators and search engines that can improve the customer experience.
 

---

---

[i]Note, Google has changed the display to read “Google Health” instead of ADAM. Google licenses the content from ADAM.

[ii] Everday Health (the new parent company name for what was formerly Waterfront Media) filed to go public last week. 

Leave a Reply

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website

Notify me of followup comments via e-mail