Steve Case, founder of AOL, has launched a new web site that is geared to “reform health care with a ‘people-powered’ approach to health--giving parents, patients, and caregivers all the tools they need to manage their healthcare needs and live healthier lives,” according to Case. The web site, RevolutionHealth, will be free for the first year and then cost subscribers $100 a year to access the 125 tools and online services. Case says his web site differs from competitors--such as WebMD, which launched a similar free site recently--by allowing consumers to rate their physicians, hospitals, and treatment as consumers now rate movies and restaurants. It will also leverage concepts of social networking to bring patients with similar diseases together online, and it boasts of having the best medical content, also rated by users. In addition, it will provide a secure repository for personal medical records, and provide a telephone coach to help with health issues and insurance claim problems.
Consumers may not be receptive to a paid health web site or trying to fullfill all their healthcare needs online. RevolutionHealth is “talking about tying together a lot of different services, most of which no one has been very successful in developing,” Paul Ginsburg, president of the Center for Studying Health System Change, told The Wall Street Journal. Case, who invested $100 million of his personal money to create RevolutionHealth, according to the Journal, said that the company’s concepts will become mainstream after “a 20-year journey.” Read the press release.
