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Marketing Concepts

How the Internet is revolutionizing your health care

By Robert Lemos, ZDNN October 28, 1998 3:29 PM PT

SAN FRANCISCO -- Not satisfied with their current health-care providers, consumers are going online in greater numbers to find out more about how to get and stay healthy.

Meanwhile, medical professionals are finding the Internet a valuable tool, too, in the battle to reduce costs.

The end result: The Web is writing a prescription for drastic changes in health care, concluded doctors and health-care execs who attended Internet Health Day in San Francisco on Tuesday.


"Health care is surrounded by online users," said Andy Grove, chairman of chip giant Intel Corp. (Nasdaq:INTC) "As online consumers of other goods, they are imposing their style of doing business on health care providers." The Santa Clara, Calif. company sponsored the one-day event where health care providers and doctors met with companies intent on bringing the Internet to them.

  "The rest of the economy is being changed by consumers that want to take control," said Regina Herzlinger, a professor at Harvard Business School, during a talk. "Health care is next ... and the computer and the Internet are playing a critical role."

'Chat rooms represent an opportunity to talk with people who have been there and survived' -- Dr. C. Everett Koop

What do consumers want? More control over how they are treated and more convenience in gaining access to care.

The Internet is helping consumers on both fronts. "People have no time," Candice Carpenter, chairwoman and CEO of women's online site iVillage Inc. during her speech. "The Internet lets people time-shift their lives."

That ability to make health care convenient makes the Internet a large part of the solution to improving the health of consumers, said Harvard's Herzlinger.

For example, only 43 percent of medical supply maker Johnson & Johnson's employees had their children's immunizations up to date. The reason? Getting the shots required a time consuming visit to the doctor.


Now, sites like the Mayo Clinic's HealthQuest Online aim to help companies keep their employees informed. Working with its clients, Mayo creates an Internet health site tailored to each company and its employees.

Consumers want control
For consumers that want to take control of their health, especially those with chronic illnesses, the Internet can be a boon.

"The Internet is the biggest thing to hit medicine since the invention of Penicillin," said Bob Pringle, president and co-founder of online health site InteliHealth. The joint venture between Aetna U.S. Health care and Johns Hopkins University offers over 2 million pages of health-related information.

InteliHealth has plenty of competition. With studies estimating that between 32 to 43 percent of consumers go online specifically in search of health care information, online sites are cropping up all over the Internet.

Health site BetterHealth has over 700,000 unique visitors per month, said Robert Levitan, president and co-founder of BetterHealth's parent site, iVillage.com.

"Consumers are out to take control of their health," he said. "They did it with their finances and online stocks, now it's happening with health."

Online service America Online Inc. is seeing the same phenomenon. Every month over 4 million AOL users -- about a third of total subscribers -- use the service's health page, said Dr. Scott Rifkin, founder of AOL's health Q&A site, America's Doctor.

One of the biggest draws is Internet chat rooms dedicated to bringing together people with similar health worries. Such online support groups are key to getting health information out.

Chat for health

"Chat rooms represent an opportunity to talk with people who have been there and survived," said Dr. C. Everett Koop, former U.S. Surgeon General and now founder and chairman of Empower Health Corp. The company launched its site, Dr. Koop's Community, on Tuesday.

"We used to think we could reach people with the printed word, and then it was TV," said Dr. Koop. "The Internet beats them all."

"The HMOs have lost control of their costs and their customers are dissatisfied -- they can't survive," said Regina Herzlinger, a professor at Harvard Business School who spoke at Internet Health Day here on Tuesday.

'Money is what is going to drag healthcare into the 21st century.' -- Dr. Douglas Stetson, American Academy of Pediatrics

Over 700 health care execs, professors and doctors, gathered at the Intel Corp.-sponsored event to hear what the Internet can do to improve consumer's health and the health of the industry.

Unfortunately, said Herzlinger, the industry has a dim view of technology.

"In much of the health care community, technology is frowned upon," she said. "It is seen as adding costs without commensurate benefits."

For example, while 68 percent of doctors use e-mail for personal and professional messages, less than 2 percent of doctors use e-mail to communicate with their patients. Of those, only 13 percent actually find it useful.

That has to change, said Herzlinger. While people rate doctors at the top of the list in terms of public image, health insurance providers and managed-care providers are in the bottom three. Only tobacco companies have a worse image.

Put your money where your health is
What's it going to take to get health care on the Internet bandwagon? Saving money.

"Money is what is going to drag healthcare into the 21st century," said Dr. Douglas Stetson, executive committee member on technology for the American Academy of Pediatrics.

By informing patients about their conditions, health care can save itself money.

For instance, instead of going to the doctor every time an illness flares, the well-informed user can access the Internet and get suggestions from the doctor or other medical sites on treating minor conditions. Only when a major problem arises would the user take the time to see the doctor.

One study showed that self-management for arthritis patients saved $189 per osteoarthritic patient. While that may not be much per patient, for an industry that has to treat over 15 million cases, the numbers quickly add up.

Changing health care
Already, some health care companies are heading for the information highway.

Pharmacy health plan provider Merck-Medco Managed Care LLC has launched an online service for automating prescriptions. The company, which counts over 55,000 member pharmacies, hopes that the Internet service will reduce the work -- and increase convenience for patients -- when getting their prescriptions refilled.

"The service replaces many of the functions that required a phone call," said Merck-Medco's spokeswoman Julie Mandell. Since last June, the service has had over 80,000 users.

Another company, ChannelPoint Inc., hopes to offer small companies more choice in how they buy health insurance, while helping insurers streamline the insurance process. The startup offers software that connects health insurers, their brokers and companies over the Internet, so that companies can play what-if scenarios and find the best insurance package for its employees.

The result: Companies can get their employees insured in three to five days, rather than today's average of six to eight weeks, said Jeffrey Bork, senior vice president for ChannelPoint. That could spell significant savings for both customers and insurers, which today spend $121 billion on administration out of the $670 billion annual market in health care.

For health care providers, the time to make the critical choice is now, said Intel's chairman Andy Grove: "They can either participate in this revolution or become outsiders."