March 12th, 2008
Healthline leading PHR race
Who is leading the Personal Health Record (PHR) race?
Is it Google? Microsoft?
It could be a company few have heard of, Healthline.
In a wide-ranging, exclusive interview with ZDNet, CEO West Shell III revealed today the company is powering an Aetna PHR initiative called SmartSource.
“It takes information from your PHR, your claims data, your insurance profile and insurance plan, your employer, geography and gender, then provides truly personalized search results,” he said.Â
Aetna will be the second major health insurer to roll out a PHR solution, following Kaiser Permanente, whom we mentioned last week.
The privacy issue isn’t real here because the insurance company already has this data. The PHR just lets you see it and make use of it in new ways.
“A lot of the PHR announcements are good, but it’s not really useful – it’s a scrapbook. This will have intelligence and decision support.”
The reason you haven’t heard of Healthline is that it mainly stays in the background, through about 35 partnerships. It’s the private label behind the AARP, Time Inc.s Health.Com, iVillage, Rodale, Regents Insurance and GE Healthcare, among others.
“It doesn’t show up in Comscore,” Shell admitted, but the company’s health database gets hit 18 million times per month. “It’s a portfolio of search, navigation and content being syndicated across the network.”
The deals vary, depending on the needs of the partner. In the case of Aetna, Healthline will get a per-month fee for every employee whose employer signs up for the Aetna service. In other cases it’s a revenue-share based on ads.
Shell was previously CEO of Netcentives, which went bankrupt in 2001. He has been with Healthline for three years and raised $35 million, mainly from strategic investors, including Aetna.
While Healthline is not the primary brand on the consumer sites it serves, Shell said it’s always there. Think of it as a sort of attribution license.
“It’s all ‘powered by Healthline’, so all our customers have Healthline front and center. If you go to AOL Body we replaced Google there. Go to iVillage we replaced Yahoo there. Go to Ask.Com and type in any health term the first result is mentioning HealthLine.”
A good example of all this in action is at Self.Com, which partnered with Healthline in November. Â A search on the magazine’s Living Well page leads to a collection of answers “powered by Healthline.”
Look carefully at that results page and you’ll see the Healthline logo in the upper-right corner. (That’s it above.) The search page has another tiny Healthline bug right under the search box.
“We absolutely are monetizing across the network, especially around the consumer-facing, non-health plan publishers and providers,” Shell said.Â
Only 30% of Healthline revenue is b2b, the rest coming from its ad network, but Shell said “We’re going to increasingly deliver different monetization schemes.” That means the percentages will change as the Aetna deal ramps up and gets into the results.
While Google is focused on PHRs, and Microsoft is focused on EMRs, Shell said that Healthline is focused on decision support, getting alerts to people, based on their PHR data, in a timely manner. (Picture courtesy the University of North Texas.)
A PHRÂ ”becomes useful when you embed decision support, and get things to think about,” he said. For instance, if you search Healthline today you’ll get the latest FDA alert on statins. But put a statin into your PHR and you can eventually get alerts and other information on them in real time through Healthline’s system.
“Aetna’s PHR, currently developed by their Active Health unit, has a care engine that gives you pro active clinical rules and care alerts, via e-mail, if issues arise in your treatments and drugs and evolving care,” Shell explained.
“I’m all about transparency and real time. We’ll be continually evolving our capabilities and site to get as much fresh and useful information out as we can. Many customers want the same.
“Whether we live up to that standard now – we probably don’t. The bigger issue is the magic, the true intelligence, of a decision support platform that really helps you get more personal, actualized data.” That’s what the Aetna deal is about.
“With Aetna we can see your evolving condition, you’re taking drugs and getting tests, and your situation.
“We’d love to get to a point where we can start providing alerts and guidance so you can manage your doctors, as opposed to thinking they all know what is going on.
“A clinical rules engine that understands the rules of evolving health will really change health care costs,” he predicted.
“If we can really use technology, and motivating content, to change behavior, you’ll see a healthier population with costs going down. Until then it’s Band-Aids. (A fine product of Johnson & Johnson which has nothing to do with this story.)
“We’re going through an accelerating transition in the health care market because of our innovation,” he concluded.
“A handful of companies are pioneering, and people now understand it’s 20% of our GDP and the single biggest issue of every politician, employer and employee.
“It’s technology that will rip the cost down, and change behavior.”
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist since 1978, and has covered technology since 1982. He launched the Interactive Age Daily, the first daily coverage of the Internet to launch with a magazine, in September 1994. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
Subscribe to ZDNet Healthcare via Email alerts or RSS.
