Institute For The Future

Revolution Health is evolving to compete with WebMD

Several months ago, rumors began to swirl around the fate of Revolution Health, Steve Case's foray into the world of online health.  You can read about those early reports here.  Within the last few weeks, new stories began to circulate that the company was looking to sell itself. E-Patients.net suggested that the fate of Revolution--a hot social networking site when launched in 2007--was "another tale of hubris in the e-health sector," quoting a pre-launch blog post from Case himself:

 

We aim to build RevolutionHealth.com into the world's leading health site - and we hope that our focus on an engaging design, high levels of personalization, and an unparalleled sense of community will enable us to achieve that goal. But we're far more than a web site. We're a company that's trying to fundamentally change the health care system. Revolution Health is about making sense of the complicated world of health care. And it's about putting you-the patient-at the center of that world.

 

 

We know health care is complex, and striving to revolutionize the health care system is full of risks. But the team at Revolution Health is up for the challenge. We aren't expecting overnight success, and we know this will be a hard slog. But we are committed to seeing this through.

 

 

I guess Case's noble ambition could not keep up the economic realities of advertiser-supported social networking sites.  So Revolution Health merged last week with Waterfront Media, which owns several health-related websites--from the South Beach Diet to Drugs.com to Everyday Health.  The New York Times reported that the deal was valued at $300 million, and "would give the combined companies enough traffic in the United States to compete with WebMD, now the market leader in the online health category." 

WebMD, when it launched in 1999, also billed itself as the future of health care.  Check out the tag line on this screen shot:

WebMD has survived over the long haul, morphing along the way.  I found the above screen shot in a review written by David Kibbe in 1999 entitled, "WebMD: The Online Future for Physicians."  I find a certain irony to that title.  At the time, Kibbe was focused on Internet-based products and services that the site had to offer physicians.  But today, the online future of physicians is largely about patient-centered websites, which WebMD has become.  

According to the Times article, Waterfront Media's Everyday Health was the second-most popular health-related website in July 2008 (with 14.7 million unique visitors), and Revolution Health was third (11.3 million visitors).  "Though traffic varies month to month, the July figures would put the combined companies ahead of WebMD, which had 17.3 million visitors that month." (On its home page, Waterfront reports similar numbers for August 2008.)

So maybe Steve Case, who will remain involved with Revolution Health and take a seat on the Waterfront board, knew exactly what he was doing when he decided to sell (out?) his company and his lofty hopes for it.