Healthline - Press Coverage & Events
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"I don't know of anybody else who is matching members' claims information with a search engine to help them look for medical content,' said Julie Snyder, a technology and health care analyst at Forrester Research." Read more. (membership required)
"A key component of the service is a computerized brain from Healthline Networks Inc., which parses searches and connects terms for symptoms, diagnoses and treatments together, as well as articles and additional information. A visual map lets consumers see how various terms and concepts connect." Read more.
"West Shell III, chairman and chief executive of Healthline, said the Aetna search engine extends beyond storage of health information and provides a system to help consumers make choices about doctors, specialists, costs and other aspects of their health care. The world is not looking for a lot more health information," he said. "They're looking for how to take the information we have and making it more useful." Read more.
"Consumers are now shifting from a 'doctor is God' mentality to one of 'my doctor is a potential ally ... but I need to take control,' " said Dean Stephens, Healthline's president and chief operating officer. "The evidence says a more informed consumer is a healthier consumer. A healthier consumer costs less." Read more.
"Who is leading the Personal Health Record (PHR) race? Is it Google? Microsoft? It could be a company few have heard of, Healthline." Read more.
"While Microsoft and Google want to build general health portals for consumers (Microsoft launched HealthVault, and we're still waiting for Google Health), medical search engine Healthline is taking more of a white-label approach. It is partnering with Aetna to create a personalized health portal for insurance customers called Aetna SmartSource" Read more.
"SmartSource also includes a fascinating-looking disease "health map" that visually links all the important topics you might want to explore about a particular condition, from diagnosis to treatment and prevention." Read more.
So one of the first companies to actually take this plunge with a major insurer is the health-focused search company Healthline Networks, which today is announcing that Aetna, one of the largest health insurers in the country, will be offering a new service using Healthline technology to its members. Dubbed Aetna SmartSource, the service will be integrated into Aetna's existing online members-only Web site in order to provide personalized responses to various health-related queries. Read more.
"What's also interesting is that this is the most developed version of personalized search yet in the market... the vision of personalized health profiles and customized health search offered by Microsoft, Google and Healthline's deal with Aetna represent the future." Read more.
"Healthline Networks is pursuing a really interesting strategy as it attempts to "dance with the elephants" in vertical search in health care." Read more. Listen to the podcast
Healthline drug search — this offers enhanced content and an "interaction checker" that can alert consumers to "possible interactions — with other drugs, herbs, supplements and even foods — based on your list of medications." Read more.
Armed with that data, Ask has partnered with Healthline Networks and introduced a new Health Smart Answers, which provides definitions, links to news, symptoms, treatments and other related data in its search results. AOL also has jumped into the ring with the official launch of its new health site, AOL Body, also in partnership with Healthline. Read more.
Specialized health search engines — notably Healthline — are gaining ground and adding partners. AOL recently began using Healthline for searches on its health pages, even though Google is a close partner. Read more. (membership required)
Its Ask.com Health Smart Answers will provide a "smart answer" or brief definition to whatever health-related term a searcher is searching for along with links to authoritative sources. Those definitions will be provided by Healthline Networks, a San Francisco-based health information service used by various health-care institutions, including Kaiser Permanente." Read more.
In conjunction with the poll results, Ask.com announced a new feature on its site called Health Smart Answers, which is designed to help users find medical information faster. The feature, developed with partners Healthline Networks and Revolution Health, arranges search results so that those selected by the health care providers as trusted content on diseases, treatments, medications and other medical topics are listed first, the company said. Read more.
Healthline Networks, a San Francisco based health-care search engine and web portal company that's trying to grab market share from the Googles and WebMDs of the world, has $21 million in new capital and several new name - brand customers to brag about, includ ing AOL. Read more. (PDF file)
Healthline Networks, which runs a search engine and Web site for medical information, is expected to announce today that it has inked financing and distribution deals with an array of prominent partners. Read more.
SEEN AS A HUGE ONLINE growth sector, health and fitness continues to attract big investment and executive talent. This week alone, Healthline Networks, a San Francisco-based vertical search provider and destination site, secured $21 million in series-B financing led by GE/NBC Universal's Peacock Equity Fund. Read more. (PDF file)
In a manner of speaking, Healthline is looking especially robust today - it just received $21 million in financing. And if, like me, you often aren't acquainted with the names of financial backers, you should still recognize the entity that was behind this gift: GE/NBC Universal's Peacock Equity Fund. Read more.
Google's search domination plans depend upon not only its "new and improved" Universal Search, but all manner of vertically targeted specialty search as well: Mobile , local, video...HEALTH! While Google's "Health Architect," aka Adam Bosworth, Google VP Engineering, continues his cross-country road show prostylizing for a Google-centric U.S. healthcare system via medical conference keynotes sponsored by Google AND waxes (not so) poetic at the Google blog on a powered by Google consumerization of the medical sector, competitor Healthline is making REAL medical moves Read more.
Health information Web site operator Healthline Networks Inc. said it has raised a $21million Series B round while also locking in strategic relationships with large industry players, including NBC Universal Inc. The Series B round was led by GE/NBC Universal's Peacock Equity Fund, and also included new investors Aetna Ventures LLC, Kaiser Permanente Ventures and U.S. News and World Report. Existing investors VantagePoint Venture Partners and Reed Elsevier Ventures also took part in the round. At the same time, Healthline has secured an agreement with NBC Universal's iVillage Total Health to provide search navigation and content services. Healthline has also secured new distribution agreements to improve the content of Web sites for Aetna , AOL, Ask.com. Read more. (PDF file)
Healthline has dipped it's hand into a $21 million series B financing led by GE/NBC Universal's Peacock Equity Fund, a joint venture between GE Commercial Finance's Media, Communications & Entertainment business and NBC Universal. This is on top of their $14 million round last January. The round also includes smaller investments from Aetna Ventures, LLC, Kaiser Permanente Ventures, U.S. News and World Report, and previous investors VantagePoint Venture Partners and Reed Elsevier Ventures. Read more.
Healthline announced today a series of agreements that will enable a broad spectrum of businesses to improve the way their customers find, understand, and manage health-related information. Aetna, AOL, Ask.com, and NBC Universal are partnering with Healthline to use its search, navigation and content technology to address the shortcomings of general search engines when it comes to health-related information. Read more.
Putting at least $250 million where their mouths are, NBC Universal and GE Commercial Finance are placing bets on the web 2.0 world, having teamed up on a joint venture, recently rebranded the Peacock Equity Fund, to help identify young digital companies that could help them play in the advanced advertising space. The Peacock Equity Fund, a joint venture between NBC Universal and GE Commercial, has invested $25 million in Healthline, a health-focused vertical search engine. Read more. (membership required)
San Francisco's Healthline, however, is focusing solely on health search, and is making surprising headway. It has six million monthly unique users, and is the only search engine among the top-twenty US health-related sites -- Read more.
It's a big day for Healthline Networks. The health search and much more service (if I call them search only, President Dean Stephens gets grumpy with me!) has raised another $21m in venture funding and announced deals with several customers—including some who have put money in as part of the round. Read more.
The use of online search tools to find health information has spurred a debate about how to tap their power without sacrificing the precision required when lives are at stake.
Choose your poison: Google in search or Google in advertising. If you've ever heard of the phrase "Hobson's choice", picking a competitive ground with Google looks more like no choice at all. That's general web search. Vertical search has become a rising field; witness the heated competition and product launches in the local search segment alone. Healthcare stands out with sites like Kosmix and Healthline delving into quality resources for their search results. Read more.
Can't find the information you're looking for through Google? Legions of search engine startups are hoping to do a better job. The upstarts are banking on the idea that some Internet users are dissatisfied with their search results and would gladly shift loyalties from the industry leaders if presented with something better. Read more.
When you feel sick, there's nothing worse than not knowing the cause. It really can be worrying. The Web is a great place to research medical conditions. It can help you decide when it's time to visit your doctor. But sometimes, it is difficult to assess your symptoms. Healthline's Symptom Search can help you. Read more.
Two new health related services came our way this morning; they couldn't be more different but both could prove useful. The first is Healthline's new Symptom Search. The successful online medical resource site Healthline has added a new search function that is definitely worth a look. Symptom search lets you enter one or multiple symptoms you're experiencing and displays licensed articles from medical professionals about conditions that could be causing those symptoms. Read more.
Healthline's new Symptom Search—Healthline, the health search engine, released a feature Tuesday called Symptom Search. Type in "knee pain," for example, and it will give you 22 different possibilities of what is causing that pain. Sometimes you might have multiple symptoms, say knee pain and fever, in which case you can put both those terms in, and you get back a more refined list of causes. Read more.
A few months ago, Healthline CEO West Shell passed through the DC area, and we had coffee at my auxiliary office, Jamie's General Bean. He was particularly excited about an upcoming feature called Symptom Search -- an attempt to solve the problem of all the stuff you get if you type something like "knee hurts" into Google. Read more.
You're surfing the Internet for the latest information about colorectal cancer imaging techniques, but the keywords you enter only turn up links to support groups and cancer centers. Your options are limited and frustrating-either bang more keywords into your search engine of choice or waste time aimlessly browsing the Web sites of hospitals, universities, government agencies, and membership organizations hoping to stumble across the information you need. Read more. (PDF file)
Specialized search engines claim that they can deliver a better, more relevant performance. Some say that they carefully weed out their results to avoid anything smelling of spam or scams. How well do they deliver on these promises? To find out, I decided to run the same three searches on Kosmix, Healthline, and Healia that I ran on the major search engines: "breast cancer," "BRCA testing," and "ACL." Keep reading to see what I found. Read more.
I've assembled three individuals who are leaders of companies, all of them at this stage relatively small companies, and all relatively new companies. But all of them are doing something very interesting in a slightly different segment of health care and health care online, or as it's now starting to be called, Health2.0. Read more.
Do another search for [brittle bone disease] at Healthline.com. Like Google, except with more emphasis, Healthline provides the medical terminology Osteogenesis Imperfecta via its "Medically Speaking" function. Additionally, below that are four links to articles from content Healthline has licensed from leading medical publishers such as Thomson Gale and ADAM. Read more.
In an age in which mail-order pharmaceutical spam clogs our e-mail inboxes, how can we trust the health information we find online? If you have a serious health problem, you should see a physician, but if you want to do some independent research, can these sites really give you accurate information? I used my sore neck as a good excuse for surfing to some of these sites to see whether their diagnoses jibed with a live doctor's assessment. Read more.
Positioned somewhere between being a search engine and a content provider is Healthline, which allows access to search results either via the standard word search or via its HealthMaps. Really astute eHealth observers will remember not one but two earlier versions of the company, YourDoctor.com and InterMap Systems. Healthline was re-launched in late 2005 with a $14m venture capital recapitalization -- including funding from its original backer, VantagePoint Venture Partners. Read more.
Older individuals are increasingly using the Internet to hunt for health-related information. They're visiting Web sites to research newly diagnosed conditions, weigh the relative merits of various treatments and review Medicare Part D options. But as Web-based medical content proliferates, zeroing in on reliable information can be a frustrating experience.
Venture capitalists are pouring healthy doses of cash into consumer health web sites, revitalizing a boom-time sector that nearly wasted away during the dot-com bust. Healthline Inc., a 40-person San Francisco restart, hauled in $14 million in January from VantagePoint and JHK Investment. The medical search engine helps consumers find information, in part, by matching everday words to medical terminology. Five million visitors viewed pages on the site more than 20 million times in the second quarter of 2006, roughly double the number of visitors and page views from the previous quarter. Read more.
Today's site encourages you to try browsing without your keyboard. [Healthine's] HealthMaps gives you a convenient graphical layout of each category's information. Use links to narrow or broaden your search instead of trying new queries. You don't need to be an expert at choosing search terms. Doctors and physicians have labored to make your results applicable to you needs. Read more.
"This is the hottest space in the Internet," said West Shell, chairman and chief executive of Healthline.com, a health-care search engine. The San Francisco company raised $14 million in financing this year from VantagePoint and others. Read more. (membership required)
"[Health] search engines are also touting the reliability of their results. Healthline.com puts a "trusted" mark on results from doctor-reviewed sites and those that have been accredited by online Web ethics committees like the Health on the Net Foundation." Read more. (membership required)
Interestingly, though, the tech industry seems to be sensing a choice problem. Here and there, companies are popping up that create filters and systems that can narrow choices. Some showed their stuff here, such as search site Healthline. It narrows searches for health information to trusted health-related sites, so you don't get all that other gunk you might get if you typed "fever" into Google. Read more.
Hypochondriacs of the world, rejoice: a new Web Site, Healthline.com, Could make it easier to identify whatever doesn't ail you." Read more. (registration required)
“Vertical search sites have a big advantage over general search: They are able to go much deeper and present much more structured information for the user. Last year, roughly 100 million U.S. consumers searched the Web for health information. For Healthline.com, this was a huge opportunity to become an expert, but they didn't dive in head first. Before entering the consumer market, [Healthline] spent several years developing highly sophisticated search technologies for health care organizations, such as PacificCare, Merck and Dartmouth Medical.” Read more.
“I found Healthline to be an exemplary medical information search engine. It's easy to use, the information is relevant, and the search process is simple and intuitive. Medical information on the Web can be tricky to find, especially trustworthy medical information, and I believe Healthline does a stellar job of editing and presenting appropriate medical information that you can use.” Read more.
”The Internet has given rise to a better informed medical consumer no longer content with a doctor's second opinion, but quick to find a third, fourth and fifth view with a simple search of the Web. Healthline, a San Francisco based dot-com survivor, will unveil a broad consumer health search system that offers ‘medically guided' search results and news while insulating users from some of the dangers of self-diagnosis.” Read more.
“The advantage of Healthline is that it's specific enough to focus just on health but broad enough to include information from a variety of relevant sites.” Read more.
Healthline is a specialized medical search engine that offers high-quality, authoritative information that's easy to find, even if you don't speak medicalese. Read more.
Healthline, a very smart medical search engine with web 2.0 features, launched this evening. Tony Gentile, Healthline's VP Product Management, writes about it here. First, its a good search engine. Normal language is translated into medical terms, and refinement options are shown for related information. For instance, a search for breast cancer shows refinement options for “treatment” and “symptoms”, as well as links to the broader search of “cancer”. Read more.
One of the challenges of being a successful vertical search engine is finding that sweet spot where no one else plays. Healthline, a new health search engine out of San Francisco, thinks it's found its spot. Read more.
“Healthline positions itself as more attuned to the needs of the average consumer…and differentiates itself from conventional search engines that don't distinguish how a search term appears in the listings provided, and whether it is the main topic of the web page or is simply referenced somewhere on it.” Read more. (membership required) 
Healthline specializes in
helping people get access to sophisticated medical information. It uses
cutting-edge semantic search techniques to let someone with limited
medical knowledge mine sophisticated medical data from a Web site. By
way of example, the company says searching for “Blackberry thumb”
yields useful results.
SiliconBeat thoroughly covers the new launch of this health search engine/destination. Blogger and sometime Kelsey Group conference panelist Tony Gentile disappeared from the radar, and this is where he landed as VP of product. Read more. The Healthcare IT Guy HealthLine, a new search engine that translates regular language into medical terms and helps refine broad terms into more specific ones, launched today. Read more.
“Type in ‘cancer' in Google, and you get back
332,000,000 results. Type in ‘cancer' in Healthline
and you get 543 very tailored results. That is because Healthline
limits its searches to 62,000 of the top health Websites (approaching
50 million individual Web pages), and blends in its own doctor-reviewed
articles on 3,000 diseases and conditions (which include really great,
consumer-friendly, anatomical illustrations from ADAM). WebMD, in
contrast, searches only about one million health Web pages. For those
3,000 conditions, Healthline has also created
interactive health maps that guide you to related topics.” Read more.
Press and Analyst Inquiries
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03/12/2008 Aetna to Offer an Online Service that Helps Patients Links Records & Research, By Milt Freudenheim 
