Healthcare communications and marketing news and information

Healia To Launch On Monday

Tom Eng, of the search engine Healia just popped me an e-mail stating that he is launching a new version of the service on Monday (the site is live today).  Here's what he had to say about how the new search engine has improved since the beta launch:

"- We have enhanced the accuracy and performance of our filtering algorithms
 
- We are offering additional filters to allow people to filter by the topic of the document when they submit a disease or drug-related search (Try searching on a disease and drug name to see how they are handled differently)
 
- We provide a 'Suggested Result' from a reference site for disease and drug-related searches
 
- We detect and provide expanded equivalents to common medical abbreviations and acronyms (try searching on ACL or CVD for example)"

Organized Wisdom.com Launched

In a comment he left on this blog, Unity Stoakes, president of OrganizedWisdom.com informed everyone that he launched his new service this week (a press release about the site will go out next week).  He said: "[Organized Wisdom.com, a health-focused social networking site . . . combine[s] doctor-reviewed content from Healthwise . . . with user-generated content from people with practical health experience." 

What Does This Have To Do With Healthcare Communications?

For those of you wondering what this has to do with healthcare communications, the answer is: a lot.  As I outlined in this e-book, people are turning to the Internet to find information about healthcare in increasing numbers.  The content they find influences their perceptions of the healthcare industry and the products, services and issues it produces/highlights.  For healthcare communicators It is important to  know what online resources people are using to get health content to understand what messages they are being exposed to.

I'll be talking more about new health Websites in the coming weeks.