A quick, sobering look at Alexa´s rankings for “Health” (Alexa combines average daily visitors with pageviews to derive website traffic rankings) yields:
1) Facts:
- A top 20 list dominated by .gov (nih, cdc), pharmacies and “old”, web 1.0 companies with no health 2.0 pure-plays.
- Just one health site (NIH, rank 448) in the Alexa overall top 500
- Selected rankings: Vitals (rank 12,000), RateMDs (33,000), OrganizedWisdom (25,000), PatientsLikeMe (65,000), Sermo (195,000).
- An obviety: there´s no health equivalent of Facebook-Twitter-Wikipedia (all three in the top 15), not even a equivalent to IMDb or AllRecipes.
- Most health-related content on the Internet still flows top-down, from established institutions or dedicated encyclopedia-type sites.
- Google and other general, rather than vertical, search engines are the main portals to health information.
2) Hypotheses:
- Health social networks populated by peers (“other patients”, “other doctors”) have a low ceiling. The appeal and real value of user generated content –and other community features- decrease outside the very narrow niches in which they play.
- Some of these communities may still be very profitable if, and only if, pharma buys into them seeking targeted communication channels. Sponsorship / ad revenue from pharma seems to be the only viable business model.
- User ratings of physicians and hospitals (as of today, only for peripheral service attributes) are gaining some traction. If they are ever coupled with hard, risk-adjusted comparative data on outcomes… the implications for the healthcare industry (providers and insurers alike) would be significant.
- Open, interoperable and accessible electronic health records platforms (such as Google Health, MS HealthVault) may be the killer application this industry badly needs, opening the door to the emergence of:
o Transactional services (i.e. online medical consultations)
o Communities that include both patients and physicians among other healthcare participants
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