Online health after the dot-com meltdown: What's next?

Whole Earth, Winter, 2001 by Joe Flower

We believe this is exactly the right model at exactly the right time--assuming we can reach the inflection point of profitability.

JF: What was the result of the dot-com downturn?

DVB: A pure-play web health information business essentially doesn't exist. You have to have several businesses. Sites like OnHealth and DrKoop.com have gotten banged hard. There is still a ton of health traffic online; it's just not all going to one site.

JF: Besides making a profit, what are your goals?

DVB: The real goal of giving out health information is not just information, it's decision support: how do we help you make the best decisions? Neither we nor anyone else has accomplished that. But information, products, and services are all part of decision support. They are all of value to the consumer.

If you look at that literature about behavioral change, you will see that people need several things to help them behave differently:

1) Information and awareness. Take weight loss: Is it important? Why? How does it affect health? Are there news articles about it?

2) A sense of susceptibility: Does this really matter to me? How severe is my risk?

3) A sense of communication: You might want to talk to other people in your situation.

Only after all that can a person move to making a decision to change their behavior. Our attempt is to keep it moving toward decision support.

JF: Can people trust information from a site whose business is selling health products?

DVB: The trust issue is very big. Our question, of course, had to be, Would people trust the same source for both content and commerce? In answer, we have built a Chinese wall between the two. We will speak frankly on the content side. Content creates the advertising space. We would never pollute it with merchandising. For instance, Dr. Edell slams some vitamins. But over on the other side, we're selling them by the crate. The commerce division says, "We have no opinion. We just want to know what you want, so that we can sell it to you."

We have no trickery, no sudden pop-ups. We don't track where you go on the content side and then send you email about products related to your condition. On the commerce side, on the other hand, we'll ask you whether we can send you email about special offers.

JF: Tom Ferguson says that lots of people who use self-help sites will have nothing to do with commercial sites.

DVB: There may be some truth to that. Culturally, some of the people on those sites may see all commercial sites as part of "The Establishment." But I believe that other self-helpers see us as having lots of high-quality information, and see that we are working to gain the trust of users.

The self-help groups don't even go to the trouble that the large commercial groups do to attribute their content to the proper sources. We hold to a very stringent bar, and we are earning the trust of users.

JF: What about privacy?

DVB: The key to privacy is disclosure, letting people know what kind of information you capture, and with whom you share it, so that they can make informed choices. For instance, we don't share your information with anyone, unless it is necessary to do the fulfillment. But we have a contract with our suppliers that forbids them to share or make use of this information. They become part of our "chain of trust."