Healthline Announces HealthLinks^TM, Next-Generation Content Navigation and Search Service

New “Intelligent Hyperlinking” Service Allows Consumers to Easily Navigate Multiple Content Sources

 to Access Additional Health and Medicine Information

SAN FRANCISCO—September 26, 2006—Healthline Networks (www.healthline.com), the leading provider of intelligent health information services, today announced HealthLinks, a next-generation online navigation service. HealthLinks uses the company’s proprietary method of organizing health-related concepts to automatically identify medical terminology and intelligently create hyperlinks to relevant health information resources. This one-of-a-kind service benefits content creators and publishers by significantly enriching and integrating existing health content libraries, improving the overall consumer experience while driving increased site engagement and page views.

HealthLinks is currently available to publishers and content hosts as a licensed service, allowing them to link words and phrases in any source material, including health news stories, blog posts, and articles. The service works via either a Web-based user interface or API, and delivers the output in a variety of formats, including text, HTML, RSS and XML. Licensees may use the service to link to their own content and resources, or they may choose to link to health and medical information licensed by Healthline from leading medical reference publishers such as ADAM, Thomson Gale, ProQuest and Cerner Multum. Publishers and content hosts who use HealthLinks have the ability to identify and link more than 130 different categories of health terms, such as diseases, conditions, drugs, symptoms, treatments and procedures. HealthLinks can be applied either prior to publishing or in real-time.

HealthLinks, powered by Healthline’s underlying semantic taxonomy, offers readers one-click access to contextually relevant health and medical resources. While viewing content that has been “HealthLink’d,” users can click on any of the hyperlinks within the text to discover richer, more in-depth information on or around the topic about which they are reading. For example, the Healthline article on prostate cancer has embedded hyperlinks on selected medically important terms such as benign prostatic hyperplasia, urinary hesitancy, and hematuria (blood in the urine); when clicked on, the user is sent to other content resources directly related to the hyperlinked word or phrase. This links were automatically generated by processing the article text using the company's proprietary Health Term Identifier.

"HealthLinks takes a well-known and proven navigation concept—hyperlinking—and applies semantic algorithms to make health information significantly more valuable to both patients and publishers," said Tony Gentile, Healthline's vice president of Product Management. "HealthLinks represents the initial offering in a second wave of differentiated services built on our semantic medical taxonomy. The taxonomy is an invaluable asset and innovator's dream—one which we'll leverage continuously to provide consumers and partners with superior health information offerings."

One of Healthline's first HealthLinks licensees is TeleVox, a software provider that is using HealthLinks to enhance its online patient-provider lab test results service called LabCalls®.

"Every product advancement TeleVox makes is targeted toward improving patient communication and office efficiency, and HealthLinks has taken LabCalls to the next level,” said Neil Armentrout, TeleVox president and CEO. “By adding HealthLinks to this convenient patient Web interface, our patients can now learn more about conditions while they are viewing their test results—when that information is top of mind and most relevant."

"HealthLink'd" content can also be seen within the licensed Health Articles on Healthline.com, and in blog posts appearing on the new Health Matters™ blog network, which was announced separately today.

About Healthline

Healthline Networks offers an innovative approach to meeting the needs of today’s health information seeker. The company’s unique consumer healthcare taxonomy, created in 1999 in collaboration with 1,100 medical specialists, powers a suite of intelligent health search, navigation and content services. Combining advanced search technology with deep medical expertise, Healthline and its business partners—a network of trusted destination sites that include publishers, portals, search engines, employers and health plans—help consumers navigate the complex world of healthcare information, empowering them to make more confident, informed decisions. Headquartered in San Francisco, Healthline is backed by VantagePoint Venture Partners, Reed Elsevier Ventures, Mitsui & Co., Ltd., and JHK Investments, LLC.

Company information:
Bill McGee
Senior Vice President, Marketing Services
415-281-3113
bill@healthline.com