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Yes, but I think the "surge" is ubiquitous
I work for a healthcare company (disclaimer: my statement and opinions are my own and in no way reflect my employer, who'm I'm not even divulging) and have researched health portals like the ones you've mentioned. I've seen revolutionhealth before.
I suspect that there's been a rise is ALL types of sites from adult to self-help to health content. I think the poor content quality and stranger features comes from business or Web site requirements for companies trying to position themselves as "better than the competition." Additionally, I think health-related products are on the rise (fitness video games, weight loss products, etc).
Health and wellness sites come in a few flavors:
Subscription-based (needs continual updates)
Free, because Web publishing is "cheap" and "because we can" (wiki sites)
Free-for-you, advertiser-driven (like sparkpeople below)
Free-for-now (someone buy us - like revolutionhealth)
Free-for-you or sponsored, for example a wellness Web site from your health insurance or employer
To compete with other sites, these Web sites add features like the yellow pages or symptom tracker you mentioned. Sites can build up a large set of features such as message boards, user profiles, articles, rss feeds, newsletters, pictures, health tools or trackers, meal plans, etc.
The more unique features are things like "send a picture via phone text or email to the Web site to remind yourself of what you ate" or even "email the picture to a dietitian to get a calorie count."
It's expensive to acquire unique well-written articles, so Web sites will either copy and paste cheap or free content or have the Web developers "pull" the data from other sites and feeds. When the sites sell themselves to healthplans or companies, 10,000 articles sounds better than 500 and a feature set that includes symptom tracker and yellow pages looks even better.
Here's more health-related sites that have jumped on the Web 2.0 bandwagon.
http://www.go2web20.net/#health
http://www.seomoz.org/web2.0#cat_102
A couple of other portals
http://sparkpeople.com (free as-in-beer);
http://americaonthemove.org (non-profit);
http://hyperstrike.com (fitness example, subscription-based)
Many of the (paid) sites say something like "with rising healthcare costs America/you/your company needs alternative solutions" and "we are a/the leading/premier/newest health company that offers a comprehensive, Web-based solution, used by fortune 500 companies and healthcare plans with 50,000 eligible members" to "improve the health quality of America/you/your workforce." They can't all be the leading health company, can they?
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Last edited by Nivlong : 22 Apr 2009 @ 6:40 AM.
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1 Apr 2009 @ 9:15 AM
22 Apr 2009 @ 6:14 AM