Press Releases

Healthline Unveils a New Personalized Consumer Engagement Platform

Suite of Human-Centered Products Engage Consumers at All Points Along the Patient Pathway to Improve Health Outcomes, Lower Costs

SAN FRANCISCO – MAY 14, 2012 – Quickly moving to address the needs of major health enterprises, Healthline Networks today announced the company's Healthline Consumer Engagement Platform, a suite of technology and content services with rich personalization capabilities. Designed for health plans, large self-insured employers and providers, the Healthline Consumer Engagement Platform leverages the company’s semantic taxonomy, a clinically-driven relational database of more than 700,000 health concepts and 2 million consumer, clinician and payer terms and codes. This new offering builds on the company's core mission of engaging consumers as they take a more active role in their health, helping them navigate the overwhelming complexity and volume of healthcare information with personalized, integrated tools and contextually relevant content.

"Healthline has been developing consumer-centric health search, navigation and content for the past 10 years, and we’re now providing this experience in a suite of engagement solutions to help health enterprises effectively connect their members to actionable healthcare information," said West Shell III, chairman and CEO of Healthline Networks. "In order to drive better health outcomes and greater program efficiencies, health plans, employers and providers must find more effective ways to engage their audiences."

The Healthline Consumer Engagement Platform is comprised of core modules that can be deployed as a turnkey suite, or offered as individual components to enhance existing consumer-facing digital health resource initiatives:

  • Healthline Semantic Taxonomy – the largest consumer-friendly, clinically-vetted medical taxonomy in the world. This taxonomy is built on meaning (semantics) and concept-based relationships between disease and conditions, symptoms, medications, treatments, procedures, therapies, and specialists. It classifies a broad range of information including medical terminology, industry-standard codes, and consumer- and provider-friendly terms from multiple sources.
  • Healthline Semantic Search 3.0 – Healthline’s concept-based approach to search goes beyond simple keyword analysis to recognize queries based on medical relationships and intent. Healthline’s Medically Guided Search® uses the company’s semantic taxonomy to help consumers find answers quicker by automatically identifying the context of the query, including search for symptoms, treatments, doctors, and medication. For example, the search term "wheezing" automatically displays a clinically accurate list of potential conditions related to this symptom such as asthma. New personalization features include the ability to enhance results based on web interactions, user profile, claims and PHR data.
  • Healthline Content and Visual Learning Solutions – the Healthline Consumer Engagement Platform includes a breadth of clinically-reviewed content that includes consumer-friendly health reference articles and topic centers, context-driven SmartAnswers, medical term explanations, expert health blogs, videos and recipes. Rich, interactive 3-D visual learning resources, BodyMaps™ and Bodies in Motion, drive demonstrable increases in visitor engagement. 
  • HealthScribe™ Content Management System (CMS) – developed specifically for healthcare content, the HealthScribe CMS is integrated with Healthline’s Semantic Search to automatically tag and create navigation of content with clinical precision leveraging taxonomy relationships. It’s an ideal solution for managing the nuances of healthcare content management, content production and medical legal review. Licensed third party and original content can also be integrated and published from the HealthScribe CMS.
  • Healthline SmartMessaging – the Healthline Consumer Engagement Platform uses campaign targeting technology, to deliver contextually relevant smart messaging on health plan, employer and provider web portals, as well as via e-mail and SMS. For example, newly diagnosed diabetic patients will receive messaging content with guidance on how to adjust their lifestyle and diet. Subsequent communications discuss the importance of taking medications as directed, and include reminders for routine blood tests and a guide to understanding test results. The messaging system is configurable to integrate with healthcare patient relationship management solutions to quickly enhance the current consumer experience with visual, personal, and contextually relevant content.

"Aetna first built the Aetna SmartSource™ search engine, a personalized search engine for Aetna members, using Healthline's semantic search engine and innovative navigation tools like HealthMaps," said Ann Zaminski, head of member experience and digital innovation at Aetna. "The support we have received from Healthline has helped our members navigate the healthcare system and drive deeper web site engagement." 

"As consumers take on more responsibility for their health care, providers will seek to assist them in part by adapting tools and programs that engage their patient base," said Dr. Paul Auerbach, Healthline's Chief Medical Officer, Stanford University professor of surgery in the division of emergency medicine, and author of the textbook Wilderness Medicine. “For example, mapping data from a personal health record to consumer-friendly definitions and health information resources can turn a PHR from a data scrapbook into a roadmap that drives patient engagement and deeper understanding."
Healthline Consumer Engagement Platform services can be extended to mobile and other digital platforms and are available on RESTful API services, cloud hosted software as a service and black box hosted environments.

"As consumers take on more responsibility for their health care, providers will seek to assist them in part by adapting tools and programs that engage their patient base," said Dr. Paul Auerbach, Healthline's Chief Medical Officer, Stanford University professor of surgery in the division of emergency medicine, and author of the textbook Wilderness Medicine. "For example, mapping data from a personal health record to consumer-friendly definitions and health information resources can turn a PHR from a data scrapbook into a roadmap that drives patient engagement and deeper understanding."

Healthline Consumer Engagement Platform services can be extended to mobile and other digital platforms and are available on RESTful API services, cloud hosted software as a service and black box hosted environments.

About Healthline Networks

Healthline Networks is the fastest growing provider of intelligent health information services, enabling 100 million consumers a month to make more confident, informed healthcare decisions. The company's proprietary consumer healthcare taxonomy, the largest of its kind, powers a suite of intelligent health search, content and advertising services. Combining advanced search technology with deep medical expertise, Healthline partners with a network more than 50 trusted destination sites that include publishers, portals, search engines, employers and health plans. Headquartered in San Francisco and named to Deloitte's Technology Fast 500 in 2010 and 2011, Healthline is backed by Aetna, Comcast Ventures, GE, Investor Growth Capital, Kaiser Permanente, Reed Elsevier, U.S. News & World Report, and VantagePoint Capital Partners. For more information, visit http://www.healthlinenetworks.net