Controlling content: Physicians launch health Web sites

There are thousands of health sites, but some physicians believe there's still not the right information available to patients. So even as other sites suffer financial trouble, they're spending time and money to build their own.

By Tyler Chin, AMNews staff. May 28, 2001.

Joel Rutstein, MD, a San Antonio rheumatologist, has cut his practice by a third and invested $200,000 to launch a consumer site offering information about arthritis.

What's more, he plans to spend double that amount over the next two years to give the site a chance to succeed, even though a massive amount of health information -- and thousands of arthritis sites -- are available on the Internet and well-capitalized health sites are struggling to survive.

By producing and posting their own content online, Dr. Rutstein and other physicians are putting their credibility on the line against well-regarded sites, such as those offered by the Mayo Clinic, the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which can draw on far greater resources than individual physicians.

Even access to capital is no guarantee of success. Well-capitalized sites such as those owned by WebMD Corp. and Medscape Inc. are struggling despite spending millions of dollars to establish brand recognition and credibility. Drkoop.com, which was supposed to ride the credibility of former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, MD, is barely hanging on.

But physicians who have developed information-based sites say their main motivation is to educate patients, not make money.

Patient education is a mission for Marisa Weiss, MD, a breast cancer oncologist in Wynnewood, Pa.

"Many of my patients and women around the world seem to be overwhelmed by the vastness and complexity of the medical information they have to sort through in order to make decisions," said Dr. Weiss, who created a site to keep women up to date with the latest breast cancer research and treatment. "I'm a doctor first. If you see women suffer with breast cancer day in and day out and you care as much as I do, you have to find a creative and effective way to help reduce the devastation that this disease causes." [...]