HealthContentAdvisors

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

Skyscape Sits Atop 2 Health Content Trends: Mobile Access and Pharma Marketing Shifts

• Posted May 5th 2009
• Comment (1)
• by Janice

Skyscape is well-positioned to benefit from two key health content trends.  The first and most obvious is the rapid growth in usage of mobile applications for accessing health content.   Manhattan Research published in its latest Taking the Pulse® v9.0 study that 64% of doctors are now using smartphones and that the number of physicians using iPhones more than doubled in the past year alone. Clinical and administrative content continues to be made available for mobile apps in response to the demand from doctors and other clinicians.  Skyscape has seen its user-base nearly triple since the introduction of the iPhone. 

The second trend relates to the increasing use of publishing as part of marketing and sales strategies by pharma companies.  Pharma companies have a long tradition of subsidizing the distribution of authoritative medical content to physicians and other clinicians.  Whether through reprints distributed by detailers or by providing access to content via sponsored CME and conference programs, pharma has served as an intermediary between commercial medical publishers and physicians for many years.  A combination of factors, including tighter regulations on detailing and advances in digital publishing technology, is leading pharma companies to incorporate a more direct publishing component into their sales and marketing strategies.  For example, social media marketing is gaining traction for use by pharma media agencies as part of cross-media marketing campaigns and in our view brings them ever closer to becoming “publishers”.  With social media, the ad and media agencies are typically taking the lead in helping pharma companies to build communities of prospects around a drug or condition-related topic.  For more on this topic, please see the accompanying blog post: Social Media Use by Pharma Blurs Lines Between Advertiser and Publisher.

Back to Skyscape.  Last week, I met with the founders of Skyscape, Sandeep Shah and Kartik Shah (no relation), along with their new VP and investor, Will Passano, at their headquarters in Marlborough, MA.

Skyscape partners with leading medical publishers to distribute clinical content, mostly medical texts and other reference works, on the full range of mobile platforms. (Note, Skyscape got its start in 1994 creating content for Apple’s Newton.)  The list of content partners is impressive and includes the top medical publishers (Wolters Kluwer, Springer, Elsevier, Wiley, McGraw Hill and many others) and drug reference sources; they claim to offer more than 500 reference works and offer them for download for fees similar to a print book, generally $50 - $100 for a reference work.  They compare this to an iTunes model. 

Their primary revenue model is selling content directly to doctors and other clinicians.  Skyscape makes it easy to purchase and use clinical reference works with an intuitive interface and the addition of Smartlinks, their own technology that allow users to navigate directly to related information between applications. 

But Skyscape’s business model extends beyond direct sales.  They also offer programs for pharma companies to subsidize content, and offer the content to clinician customers as part of a marketing program that may also include alerts on brands news. 

Skyscape also creates digital versions of conference programs.  For multi-track events that take place over several days, the value add of a mobile application with digital search and linking features is obvious, especially when it replaces a 5 lb. conference book as was the case with the recent American College of Cardiology (ACC) conference guide.  This allows the company to brand themselves with a “powered by Skyscape” logo.

We like their multi-faceted business model that includes direct sales and pharma channel sales. With over 650,000 active users and continued growth in adoption of smartphones by clinicians, Skyscape merits serious consideration from healthcare publishers as a mobile distribution partner.

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. 

For Content Providers, It Pays to Stay Healthy

• Posted July 24th 2008
• Comments (0)
• by Janice

A recent alliance between EBSCO’s Health Library and HealthFitness shows how  content providers are finding lucrative new opportunities with payer-supported consumer health information services, just as broad-based consumer web health portals and ad-based social media seem to be hitting a wall.      

EBSCO Publishing is licensing its EBSCO’s Health Library to HealthFitness, which provides health management programs that include screenings, risk assessments, coaching and on-site fitness centers for Fortune 500 clients, to enhance its web-based information resources. EBSCO’s Health Library includes disease fact sheets, a drug database, articles on wellness topics, alternative and natural treatments, a medical dictionary and information about procedures and tests. 

This is a wise move by EBSCO and no doubt marks the start of an upsurge in similar licensing deals between content providers and payer-supported organizations as health management programs increase in number and re-tool to provide incentives to follow healthy living habits.  Employers that pay for health insurance have an obvious incentive to keep medical payments under control by encouraging their employees to improve their health through better nutrition, exercise, and disease-management, thereby reducing their need for medical care. This is creating demand for information aimed at keeping people healthy and provides an opportunity for content providers to do well by keeping people well.