Health Care Information Market: Who Will Fill The Increasing Demand?

Every doctor’s nightmare is the patient who comes in to discuss this or that answer that they Googled up last week. While educated patients are a pleasure to work with, most of the time the material that has been researched leads to badly misinformed patients. This requires hours of work to try to explain urban legends that don’t really work.

In some cases, these attempts at rational explanation are met with failure because the internet material sounds a whole lot more promising and “sexy” in some situations, and emotion is more powerful than rational thought. When faced with serious medical problems, this can mean deadly consequences.

Where does that leave us?……It leaves us in extremely urgent need of self regulation instead of the probable creation of additional Draconian policies from regulatory agencies like the FTC. The former sounds like a better deal to me and is both an altruistic people-centered movement as well as a high return-on-investment proposition.   The latter is lose-lose and here’s why… There is huge opportunity out there and there is as much room as vast consumer demand will fuel. Offering quality health information can be a hugely lucrative online business opportunity, but the key is in the word “quality”. On balance, it’s very very sketchy. There is far more crap than good stuff online, because it is easy to throw it together and catch a few bucks every where you turn. Rinse and repeat several hundred times and you can be a zillionaire slum lord of health-info garbage. So, where do consumers turn to avoid this, or do they even know better?

As we approach 100 million blogs, only a few hundred doctors are blogging. Granted that they are not the only source of quality information, but this is still a huge discrepancy. More and more health professionals are entering the Web 2.0 world, but mainly the information is written at a peer to peer “medicalese” level. As such it is high level and not too many consumers can keep up or get anything out of them. Very few credible health professional bloggers write to the lay audience in the blogosphere. Those that do are often in a sterile online corporate medical milieu which still does not satisfy consumer demand for health problems they are experiencing RIGHT NOW!

Basically with limited access to health care providers in the bricks and mortar world, savvy folks online are beginning to drive the consumer-driven Web 3.0 health care movement. Who has credible influence, where are they and what do they have to say? That is the new Holy Grail quest. In order for patients to safely take on some of their problems in a “do it yourself” fashion, it is CRITICAL that true experts that can help are sought out.

Most lay “researchers” cannot begin to provide the quality information that is required to prevent disease, manage mild ailments or even more serious disease management. There are also lots of unscrupulous quacks out there. But in partnership with credible expert health care providers, there is a huge opportunity for health-care information marketers who want to fill the increasing void. Those that do the right thing right will reap their just rewards. Find out how-to do this on this site, HealthCareMarketingLab.com .

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