HealthContentAdvisors

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

NYC Aims to Limit Salt While the AAFP Website Promotes Salty Foods

• Posted January 12th 2010
• Comments (4)
• by Janice

The Bloomberg administration has launched an initiative to reduce salt in restaurant food by 25% and overall salt consumption by 20% over the next five years.   The National Salt Reduction Initiative is a nation-wide program supported by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and other donors.  Funding for the evaluation of salt intake guidelines was provided by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the New York State Health Foundation, the National Association of County & City Health Officials and the Centers for Disease Control. 

According to the January 11, 2010 press release:

The goal of the initiative is to cut the salt in packaged and restaurant foods by 25% over five years – an achievement that would reduce the nation’s salt intake by 20% and prevent many thousands of premature deaths. The sodium in salt is a major contributor to high blood pressure, which in turn causes heart attack and stroke, the nation’s leading causes of preventable death. These conditions cause 23,000 deaths in New York City alone each year – more than 800,000 nationwide – and cost Americans billions in healthcare expenses.

Given the known health risks of excessive salt intake, why would FamilyDoctor.org, the consumer health portal published by the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) promote deli meats on their Healthy Living page?  Granted, they may not be endorsing deli meats in their editorial content, but they have a large banner ad for Boar’s Head deli meats on the site and a full-page ad from Boar’s Head in their digital newsletter.  I don’t want to specifically single out Boar’s Head (ads for Buddig meats also appear on the site, along with ads for Hellmann’s Mayonnaise), but check out the sodium content in Boar’s Head Pastrami.  Just so you don’t think I chose the worst offender, you can look up the smoked liverwurst or any of the hams.  (Note, you can check nutrition fact labels of a long list of food items and restaurant items on this About.com site: http://caloriecount.about.com/.  Warning, the fast food listings are frightening!)

Back to my question.  Why would ads for foods so high in sodium be prominently placed on the AAFP Health Living site?  I don’t know with certainty, but it looks to me like a failure in choice of online ad network and ad sales agency.  One could go further and say it’s a failure in revenue model choice for an online consumer health site published by a medical association, a group that should be providing trustworthy content.  Note, I wrote earlier about the recent partnership between AAFP and Coca-Cola to: “provide Americans with credible information on beverages and enable consumers to make informed decisions about what they drink based on individual need“.  Certainly there are better options than to have soft drink and deli meat companies sponsoring sites that are supposed to promote healthy food choices. 

The parallels to sponsorship models in scholarly medical publishing are obvious.  When pharmaceutical and device manufacturers sponsor publications, it is difficult to accept that there is no bias in the editorial content–even if there is none.  On consumer sites, where there is such a strong need for reliable unbiased health, nutrition and exercise information, just the appearance of ads on the site may be harmful because of the implicit endorsement of the advertisers’ products. 

It may take some work to find a more acceptable roster of advertisers, but better options exist than those currently being pursued by AAFP.   Why not work with other stakeholders in the healthcare industry that share the objective of improving consumer health and wellness?  For instance, health insurers, employers, hospitals, and even other health content publishers are building and promoting wellness programs at a fast clip.  They need to promote their programs and offer authoritative content to engage consumers.  That sounds like an opportunity for a partnership.  As a parting thought, perhaps AAFP should speak to Mayor Bloomberg and his staff to get some ideas on where to find sponsors that will support research and publication of trustworthy health and wellness information.

Headlines for April 7-18

• Posted April 18th 2009
• Comments (0)
• by Janice

MyOptumHealth Consumer Health & Wellness Portal Launches

• Posted December 4th 2008
• Comment (1)
• 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. 

Benjamin Wolin, CEO of Waterfront Media joins Health Content08 program

• Posted October 23rd 2008
• Comments (0)
• by Janice

Blockbuster sessions with CEOs and heads of strategy for the leading consumer and professional healthcare publishing firms will dominate the morning program at Health Content08 on Thursday, November 13.  Hear what’s on the minds of these industry leaders and find out how healthcare publishers are re-vamping their product marketing strategies to take advantage of the consumer-driven healthcare and evidence-based medicine trends.   

Keynote speaker  West Shell, Chairman and CEO of Healthline Networks, will kick off the program.  Then, the opening panel on Consumer-Driven Healthcare features  Ben Wolin, CEO of Waterfront Media, which recently announced its merger with Revolution Health, and Jack Barrette, CEO of WEGO Health.  This panel session will debate how consumer health sites with a mix of advertising, subscription and sponsorship business models are faring. 

Following the conference theme of Incumbents, Innovators and Intermediaries, the second panel will include well-known names in medical publishing.  Tom O’Connor, Managing Director, Berkery Noyes, will lead this session that includes leading strategists from Elsevier Health Sciences, Hearst Business Media, Wolters Kluwer Health, and RemedyMD. 

This all-star line-up is certain to energize the audience and set the stage for our afternoon sessions that will delve into more specific examples of innovation in patient education, clinical information, personalized medicine and price transparency.  Thursday’s full-day program is preceded by the debut of Health Content’s Innovators Showcase, where 12 early-stage companies selected by our Advisory Committee, will present their business models to the Health Content08 audience. 

There are only 30 seats remaining.  Register now to reserve your place at Health Content08, the ultimate networking event for health care publishers. 

Headlines for October 6-7

• Posted October 7th 2008
• Comments (0)
• by Janice

Headlines for Oct 3-5

• Posted October 5th 2008
• Comments (0)
• by Janice

Headlines for September 19

• Posted September 20th 2008
• Comments (0)
• by Janice

Headlines for September 18

• Posted September 18th 2008
• Comments (0)
• by Janice

Revolution Health and Everyday Health to Consolidate?

• Posted September 10th 2008
• Comments (0)
• by Janice

Just two weeks ago, we wrote about the likely shakeout and consolidation among the many consumer health websites in this crowded space.  Now, rumors of a merger between Steve Case’s Revolution Health and Waterfront Media’s Everyday Health are gaining credence.  Today, the Washington Post and PaidContent report that Revolution and Waterfront are in discussions to merge in an attempt to overcome WebMD as the most highly trafficked online health site. 

Staci Kramer at PaidContent interviewed Ben Wolin, CEO of Waterfront Media, who told her “I think all the major health sites out there are talking to each other.  We’re going to talk to every single health site and see if there are deals to be had to get to that milestone and I include Revolution in that group of companies. Whatever happens with Revolution, they’re the number 3 player right now and it’s going to shake up the market place.”

Clearly, Waterfront’s strategy is to survive the shakeout by being the largest consumer health site, measured by traffic.  It’s a solid short-term strategy that will continue to attract investors and advertisers in the high-growth online consumer health market(1).  But, long-term survival will require using their size advantage to continually invest in creating value and efficiency for the consumers who visit their sites.  Otherwise, they will invite other upstart competitors to overtake their leading position via a similar consolidation strategy.

We’ll keep a watchful eye on activity in the online consumer healthcare space and continue to keep you abreast of likely developments. 

(1) See the latest ComScore data that reports the health information site category has grown 21 percent during the past year, 4 times faster than overall Internet traffic.