Usually I’m wary of putting time into big-budget health portals, but San Francisco based Healthline deserves a mention. They have a portfolio of healthcare search, navigation and content that is syndicated through a growing network of big web properties like AARP, Health.com, iVillage, AOL etc.

Healthline was founded in 1999 as YourDoctor.com and was re-launched as Healthline Networks in 2005. It’s got some deep-pocket investors behind it (Aetna, NBCU, Kaiser Permanente, Reed Elsevier, US News & World Report to name a few) so I’m not surprised that they have managed to create (what they call as) ‘Consumer Healthcare Taxonomy’ of >1 million terms and 250K medical concepts. That is what powers their proprietary ability to organize and present contextually-relevant health information to a viewer. Personally I dont think much of it, given that there are plenty of precursors in the medical ontology area (SNOMED, UMLS…) that match this feat.

So Healthline can power health search in multiple ways (symptom, treatment, doctor, drug) and help consumers navigate to the right information. They have also branched out into health-specific ad network, PHR etc. Regardless, I’m interested in mentioning Healthline because of their excellent 3D Body Maps. They have a neat library of 3D animations that lets you partially control and understand body structure and function. Much like CareFlash. Development of these consumer-oriented educational health content repositories is a positive trend, although it’d be much nicer if all these individual attempts were cataloged in one place, giving a complete guide to educational 3D health and wellness content on the web. Like what Clicker does for Internet television.

I found out about SeniorEducators during a trip to the bay area last year. They are a startup trying to help seniors make the most out of their medicare benefits.

Quick Medicare tutorial: It consists of Part A, B, C and D. None pays for all of a covered person’s medical costs. The program contains premiums, deductibles and coinsurance, which the covered individual must pay out-of-pocket. After 1997, beneficiaries were given the option to receive benefits through private health insurance plans, instead of original Medicare plan (Parts A and B). That’s why today Medicare insurance market is a complex landscape, filled with lots of insurance companies offering thousands of plan options.

It’s hard to understand it all, let alone find one that fits your health need as well as budget. There is competition, for sure-small (ehealthinsurance, healthinsurancefinders, medigap ) and big (United, Aetna, Cigna..). But I didn’t find many that were only focused on Medicare- most seemed like one-stop shops for all health insurance needs, trying to target everyone.

Notably, this consumer segment is predictably technology-averse with significant communication need. Which is probably why all SeniorEducator online content is in simple language with easy navigation, and they use toll-free numbers to connect with the customers. It’s a good strategy, and it’ll be interesting to see how much traction they can get in a mature market with big entrenched players.

OrganizedWisdom describes itself as the first human-powered, doctor-guided search service for health. What the site promises to provide are noise-free, simple but organized search pages that list relevant information on health topics. Its a crowdsourcing model at heart- these pages are essentially hand-crafted search results aggregated by OrganizedWisdom Guides and Physician Reviewers (eligible volunteers) who get paid $2 to $4 for each approved ‘WisdomCard‘. Given thier start in late 2006, their content coverage seems significant. I liked the easy signup for RSS/Twitter updates on a particular topic, related WisdomCards, RequestWisdom functionality.

Their business model is advertising, where interested companies can push their ads on specific WisdomCards that are most relevant to their target audience. With an average 40K visitors per month, I wonder how that model is working out for them.

Curbside.MD is a search engine for finding evidence based clinical information. The idea is to type in the search need as a natural language question that a clinician would normally ask his/her colleague, and get relevant answers from the literature (articles, images, guidelines, etc.)

I took it for a test drive with a moderately complex question (‘what is the indication for platelet transfusion in an 80 year old female with dengue fever?’) and got relevant results in terms of review articles and clinical trial outcomes. Pretty cool.

The logic behind Curbside.MD is semantic indexing using a controlled medical terminology (they call it “semantic fingerprinting“) with a bit natural language processing. They provide a bunch of tools (search box, news, spellchecker etc.) for partners and a browser search toolbar for users. The technology is also available as an API service from an alternate website called Fingerprint.MD.

Praxeon is the company that started Curbside.MD and MyDailyApple in 2006. Both websites are currently free for users, but the company admits to a future ad-based business model.