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Archive for the ‘Medical Search’ Category

Healthline’s Semantic Ad Network for Health Content

• Posted June 9th 2008
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• by Janice

Healthline, announced today its entry into the vertical ad network business with its healthcare-focused media network called HealthSTAT™ On-Demand.  HealthSTAT is a welcome addition for medical and healthcare publishers that need new options for revenue generation beyond AdSense and the other general search engine ad networks.  HealthSTAT joins other recent entries in the healthcare ad network space, including IAC/The Health Central Network and Glam Media. Healthline’s initial group of publishing partners includes some trusted traditional brand names and some new entrants (AARP, USNews.com, Time Inc.’s new Health.com, PracticeFusion, Elder.com, HealthPricer, and JustAnswer), as well as its own Healthline.com portal and a new consumer health portal to be launched by United Health later this year, MyOptumHealth. 

We’ve noted before that online health sites that rely primarily on pharma advertising revenue are showing slow and disappointing results. It’s time to think beyond the pharma companies as the only source of ad dollars for consumer health sites.  What impresses me about Healthline (an InfoCommerce 2006 winner), is its understanding of sponsorship opportunities. Its recent deal with Aetna and the signing of United Health in this new ad network show that Healthline recognizes insurers are good publishing partners.  It is important to note that these same insurers should be good prospects as advertisers on the HealthSTAT ad network, too. 

There will undoubtedly be more entrants in the healthcare vertical ad network market. Healthline, with its much-touted medical taxonomy, has built a good technical foundation on which to build its ad network.  But it’s Healthline’s demonstrated ability to form partnerships with important stakeholders that puts it ahead of competitors.

 

SearchMedica.com Expands Content and Functionality

• Posted May 16th 2008
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• by Marji

SearchMedica, a search engine for medical professionals, announced this week that it has added electronic Medicines Compendium (eMC) to the GP section of Searchmedica.co.uk. Now, users can access drug information from a variety of sources in just one search.

This announcement by SearchMedica, a unit of CMPMedica, UK, comes just two months after an alliance was formed between SearchMedica.com and Advanstar’s ModernMedicine.com. This particular partnership called for SearchMedica to power ModernMedicine’s web searches to yield users more robust results.

SearchMedica ranks search results based on relevance but also sorts results to make them more actionable for users. It organizes results into categories such as practical articles and news, research reviews and editorials, evidence-based articles and meta-analyses, practice guidelines, clinical trials for patients, continuing medical education, and alternative and or complementary medicine.

Both announcements illustrate CMPMedica’s commitment to expanding the content and reach of SearchMedica. They will help SearchMedica achieve goals of providing relevant information to medical professionals and making it easier for them to locate that data in the process. It doesn’t matter if you have the best content in the world if users can’t access it. These two alliances are combining to enable SearchMedica to provide both extensive content and search capabilities to its users–two vital components of the online information industry. It will be interesting to see if CMPMedica forms additional alliances in the short term to further bolster its offerings to the marketplace.