As a small business owner, I’m concerned about the growing costs of health care. This year our insurance went up 16%…nothing to sneeze at. We also upped our company contribution to 60% (from 50%), so I’m acutely aware of this cost on our bottom line.
A few weeks back, BusinessWeek ran an interesting story called Get Healthy–Or Else, about how Scotts, the lawn-care company, is tackling the high cost of health insurance. Some might argue their approach is forward thinking (one employee’s life was saved by being nagged to go to a physical) or invasive (another employee was let go for failing a drug test for…tobacco.)
The Internet’s Role In Health Care
In the last decade the Internet has had a positive impact on the way people manage their health and has helped to make them healthier. One common complaint among people is that doctors have been slow to adopt e-Health and are not offering the online health services they want.
Health, Search, And Social Media
People who search for health related issues online are exposed to a large amount of user-generated media. They are frequently relying on corporate, nonprofit and government Web sites along with blogs and other social media according to a study from Envision Solutions done in December.
TauMed Takes Health Vertical To Community
Health care verticals have begun to build a foundation on the Internet. TauMed’s founder Tauseef Bashir wants people to enjoy a healthy online community along with the most relevant health information they can find.
ASP.NET 2.0: Health Monitoring
The ASP.NET 2.0 provider model has once again amazed me.
Searchers Rarely Vet Online Health Sources
Can there be an online placebo effect, or is the health information online just really that good? That could be investigated, but it seems the average online health information seeker wouldn’t go so far as to find out.
Health Sites Reap October Search Crops
If companies as a whole have been slow to adopt search marketing, certain sectors may want to reconsider and reallocate their budgets. Health and Medical websites, for example, received 43.5% of their traffic last week from search engines, according to Hitwise.
JupiterResearch On Health Search Engines
JupiterResearch has released a report on health search engines. Now, I know what you’re thinking, but these figures actually seem fairly reasonable. The company asserts that many people “use search engines to find health-related information,” but only a fraction of them “find the information they are looking for.”
Google Health Scrapbook?
Josh Jaffe writes about a developing Google product, Google Health Scrapbook, a service that will allow users to manage their entire medical lives, from adding medical providers, checking medical records, and paying bills. Google met with WebMD in New York last week to partner with them on this project, which would also provide information on hospitals to help patients choose.
Google Health Actually Google Co-op
So Google Health was a slight-of-hand, what we really got today was Google Co-op (beta, of course). From Google’s press release…