Information driveway: Physicians create inexpensive Web sites offering health data to patients

Despite the failures of big-bucks health sites, people continue to look for medical information online. Some physicians have learned to use the Web to their advantage, saving their patients -- and themselves -- time and money.

By Tyler Chin, AMNews staff. Sept. 9, 2002.

Many of the companies that tried to make big money by offering health information on the Internet are dead, but the demand for their product appears to be greater than ever.

In July, Drkoop.com Inc., a company once valued at more than $1 billion, was sold for a paltry $186,000, joining a long list of online consumer health information companies that have either vanished or become mere shadows of their former selves. Despite attracting a bevy of visitors to their sites and supplying high consumer demand for online medical information, these companies have failed to make money.

The reason for this is simple: Their business model doesn't work. Turns out consumers aren't seeking one trusted site; more often than not, they want to take whatever ailment they're interested in and look at every site they can that's devoted to it. It also turns out no one needs to spend millions of dollars to develop a Web site. For a few hundred dollars, or less, anyone can put up a health site.

That low-cost reality and the knowledge that consumers want health information online are leading some physicians, including Hernando, Miss., internist Robert R. Meacham, MD, to create inexpensive practice sites offering patients what they say is high-quality information. For a while, at least, the Internet is going to be a place where health information runs unfettered.

"There's all that information out there and so much of it is not reliable," says Dr. Meacham, who got a free site last year from Medem Inc., founded and financed by the AMA and other specialty and state societies. "For patients who are using the Internet, who see that I have a Web site, there's the hope that they will use my site to get [reliable] information." [...]