The Health 2.0 movement, as I’ve noted before, makes some big claims about the Internet’s power to transform the relationships between patients and doctors, hospitals, insurers and each other. Some of that is undoubtedly true, and there’s a fascinating amount of innovation going on in this area– helped along by a recent torrent of venture capital.
There’s a downside to the movement, though, and that’s a bizarre oversupply of sites that are all doing slight variations on the same thing. Were you able to pick a Health 2.0 site at random, chances are good you’d hit one of dozens of online physican directories, health-specific search sites or health “portals” with some sort of attached social community. (Or even a site doing some combination of these, such as the health-search-and-community site iMedix, which we reviewed here.)
Probably nowhere is the glut so severe as among sites that aim to help patients find — and sometimes compare — doctors. Consider, for instance, the case of CareSeek, a Solvang, Calif., startup that last year launched a doctor-rating service called, reasonably enough, NursesRateDoctors.com. The idea was straightforward: Let nurses, who are in an unmatched position to observe doctors and their treatment of patients, could dish anonymously about physicians worth seeing — and those to avoid.
But lots of other entrepreneurs had similar ideas for doctor directories and rating services. “When we started, our competitive analysis showed there were maybe six sites doing this,” says CareSeek founder Gale Wilson-Steele. “We recently counted 31. The doctor review and rating space is very big and very noisy. But it creates a problem — no one is going to go to all these sites and rate the same doctor 31 times.”
CareSeek sought its advantage by appealing specifically to nurses, who frequently chafe at the perceived lower status of their profession relative to doctors. The company built its own director of doctors (for some of the general difficulties that presents, see my dCard post) and then went all-out to attract the attention of nurses. “We did everything,” Wilson-Steele says. The company ran banner ads, attended trade shows and handed out gift certificates and chocolate bars bearing the message, “Help raise the bar in healthcare” and the site’s address. CareSeek even set up a laptop in a medical-uniform shop and offered a discount to nurses who agreed to rate a doctor on the spot. (More recently, it also established a partnership with an online nurses-uniform site.)
The idea is a variation on the old strategy of specializing in order to stand up to larger competitors (which in this case includes WebMD, RevolutionHealth, and — soon enough — Google Health). “We just have this specialized information,” Wilson-Steele says. “At some level, hundreds of patient reviews aren’t better than two or three good ones.”
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Like any other Internet craze, Health 2.0 is plagued with a glut of startups that are all doing variations on the same thing — health-related search, social communities, and physician ratings/directories.