"The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will interest patients in the maintenance of the human frame, in diet and in the prevention of disease."
Thomas Edison
The Internet, providing immediate access to a vast world of health information and services, has emerged as a powerful medium to help in bringing about a planetary transformation in the delivery of health care as well as the education of consumers in the principles of healthy living. The past year has seen an explosion of health-related web sites on the Internet as hospitals, HMOs, and health organizations seek to fill the growing public demand for reliable, consumer-oriented health information, research, and services to allow individuals to make intelligent decisions regarding their health and the health of their families.
The vast majority of health web sites are Internet extensions of currently operating health care businesses. However, a new breed of Internet company has been born during this period, created for the sole purpose of using the Internet as a solution for existing problems or deficiencies within health care delivery as well as consumer and professional education. HealthWorld Online, a leading global Internet Health Network focused on consumer health empowerment and Self-Managed Care, falls into the later category.
Educating the Well and Serving the Chronically Ill Population
The prevention and treatment of chronic illness is probably the most promising area in which the Internet can make a powerful contribution the quality and cost of health care as well as the general health of the population. Currently, chronic illness currently affects 45% of the U.S. population (100 million), with treatment of chronic illnesses currently accounting for 85% of the national health care expenditures,1 to the tune of $659 billion annually. By the year 2030 this figure is expected to reach nearly $800 billion.2 Chronic disease patients are over three times as expensive to treat than patients without chronic illness. This, coupled with lost time in the workplace, makes chronic illness the number one health care headache in the U.S.3
There are two keys to controlling the costs of treating chronic illness:
1) Prevention through education and lifestyle modification
2) Shifting the burden of care to a home setting
Self-Managed Care
At the same time, the consumer market in the U.S. is primed for natural and alternative medicine information, products and services. As early as 1991, over 34% of Americans were utilizing alternative medicine services, according to a Harvard study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.6 The study also showed that people made more visits to alternative practitioners (425 million) than to all primary care M.D.s (388 million) and expressed greater confidence in their alternative physician. This trend is also illustrated in the Natural Products Industry, which has now reached $17 billion in annual sales and is in a state of accelerated growth.7
HealthWorld Online has aligned itself with three separate but philosophically attuned health-related movements to form the foundations for Self-Managed Care--the wellness, self-care and alternative medicine movements--each of which has taken root in United States over the past 20-30 years. These parallel themes of Self-Managed Care are now recognized as essential foundations of the emerging 21st century medicine and are playing pivotal role in the democratization of health information on the Internet.
Today individuals are looking to manage their own health through a wellness-oriented lifestyle, enlightened self-care, and when necessary, the use of safe and cost-effective natural therapies. Savvy health consumers want a full range of treatment options from both conventional and alternative medicine. The key word is choice. The Internet can provide the elements for developing a wellness-oriented lifestyle, and the information, resources and education for effective self-care--and the Internet brings the information on-demand, into our homes and offices.
Self-Care
One of the rapidly emerging forms of self-care in American today is the use of dietary supplements, herbs and homeopathic remedies as well as an increased focus on organic foods and a healthy, whole foods diet. One only needs to view the shelves of a chain drug store to realize how great the consumer demand has become. In fact, Nutrition Business Journal (Vol. 1, No. 1) estimates that the natural products industry has now reached some $17 billion in annual sales and is in a state of accelerated growth. HealthWorld Online provides and comprehensive resource for consumer and professional level information and education about dietary supplements, herbs, homeopathic remedies and whole foods nutrition. in the following three sites to serve the growing public demand for a greater participation in their health care:
Wellness
Alternative/Complementary/Traditional Medicine
The Alternative & Complementary Medicine Center also includes free Medline access, referral databases to alterantive health professionals, a searchable calendar of global events in alternative medicine, a Speaker's Network of alternative medicine experts, a library of articles from leading experts on how to integrate alternative and mainstream medical practices, six full text alternative medicine journals, and an audio library of over 200 Real Audio tapes from leading professionals on alternative and complementary approaches to over 60 health conditions. The Alternative and Complemenary Medicine Center provides choice.to consumers and employees who are demanding the freedom to make intelligent, informed choices concerning their personal health and wellness as well as the health of their families.
Meeting the Needs of Managed Care and Corporate Wellness Programs
Possible Components of a Customized Intranet: Major Information/ Resource Centers in HealthWorld Online
Health Clinic: Information and resources on family healthcare issues, emergency care, self-care, online professional referral databases, online ordering of laboratory services, alternative approaches to specific health conditions, and an alternative medicine center.
Library of Health & Medicine: Valuable medical reference texts, professional journals, online audio library (220 tapes), free MEDLINE, Cybrarian Service, interviews, columns from the experts, searchable databases, and upwards of 30,000 pages available.
Marketplace: An online bookstore and health food Store offer over 6,500 products with shopping cart technology and secure online credit card ordering. A "healthy travel" center allows consumers to book healthy travel getaways and the insurance center offers free quotes for health/dental/life/wellness insurance policies.
Nutrition Center: A broad range of information to the consumer and health professional on diet and nutrition, focusing on a healthy whole foods diet and the role of diet and nutrition in health and illness. The"Healthy Kitchen" section provides healthy recipes and instructions on setting up a whole foods kitchen. Users have access to the latest nutritional research, research databases, and other nutritional resources.
Fitness Center: Offers a balanced, wellness-oriented approach to fitness with a strong emphasis on natural health, nutrition, and mind/body fitness. Exercise physiologists and natural health experts offer advice on training, peak performance, self-applied health enhancement methods, sports medicine, and fitness programs for special populations.
Wellness Center: Provides valuable, consumer-based information on staying healthy in body, mind and spirit through living a wellness-based lifestyle. A host of leaders and experts in the Wellness movement provide guidance in the areas of healthy aging, mind/body health practices and spirituality and health.
Self-Care Central: Coordinated by medical self-care and online health authority, Tom Ferguson, M.D. Resources on self-care, searchable databases for self-help.
Health University: Online and offline courses for the continuing education of health professionals and consumers in the fields of natural health, global educational calendar, listings of medical schools, colleges, and leading educational institute.
Public Health Center: Provides health information from United States Government health agencies and the World Health Organization.
Association Network: Network of complementary web sites developed by HealthWorld Online as a public service for over 35 professional associations, and consumer health groups.
The Professional Center: Provides premium services including an extensive professional research library containing six full text alternative and complementary medicine journals, Nutritional Influences on Illness database, referrals to professional and free MEDLINE.
The Legal & Legislative Center: An invaluble resource for state and federal issues surrounding medical licensing laws, medical malpractice, FDA regulation of drugs and dietary supplements, as well as other legal issues in the arena of health and medicine.
Press Room: Disseminating WellCare-oriented health through an online press release service, "Newsbreaks," as well as our daily health news feed.
Free Services
Global Health Calendar: The Global Health Calendar is a leading online resource for health and fitness events, containing over 1,500 listings of the leading conferences, seminars and events worldwide in searchable database.
Newsbreaks: Online news service which disseminates WellCare-oriented health news to journalists, the public and professionals. Feature of the HealthWorld Online News Room.
Professional Referral Network: Offers searchable databases created from membership lists of numerous professional associations, including homeopathic, naturopathic, chiropractic, holistic medicine, and acupuncture.
Professional Home Pages: Home pages for experts in the various areas of wellness, self-care, natural health care, alternative and complementary medicine, and integrative medicine within our fully searchable Professional Referral Network database.
Speaker's Network: Home pages for experts in the various areas of wellness, self-care, natural health care, alternative and complementary medicine, and integrative medicine within our fully searchable Speaker's Network database.
Newsletter: Bi-weekly email newsletter for HealthWorld Online members. HTML version available on web site.
Forums: Online discussion moderated by experts in the field. Forums on Vaccination, Chronic and Life Threatening Illness Support Center, Mind/Body Approaches to Chronic Illness, Legal/Legislative Issues, Issues in Integrative Health Care, and Qigong and Taiji.
Daily Health News Wire: Daily health news feed from New York Times Syndicate and Medical Tribune services, complete with archives accessible by topic.
Medline: HealthWorld Online was the first Internet site to offer MEDLINE database from the National Library of Medicine for free global access.
Premium Services
Cybrarian Service: Traditional medical librarians have always acted as pointers or guides to the information within their collections. HealthWorld Onlines's innovative Cybrarian Service strives to do the same thing for users on the Internet. Acting as an individual's personal "search engine," the Cybrarian will gather bibliographic citations, suggest helpful URL's, and annotate documents that would be helpful to you.
Laboratory Services: Lab tests may be ordered online directly by the consumer, allowing the consumer to be more proactive in addressing their specific health concerns. Tests results can be shared with their health professional if tests show any abnormalities. Tests offered include wellness blood profile, PSA test, drug tests, and salivary hormone tests.
Wellness Gateway Assessments: Online HRAs, wellness assessments, cancer prevention, psychological, and nutritional assessments are offered in conjunction with blood tests through our laboratory to provide a comprehensive health assessment.
Online Courses: Continuing education courses in natural medicine for pharmacists, MDs, nurses, chiropractors and other health professionals from leading Universities and educational institutes.
Premium Content
Health & Medical Reference: Our health and medical reference center includes the following seminal research texts and textbooks from the fields of nutrition, Chinese Medicine and naturopathic medicine: Nutritional Influences on Illness (also offered as yearly subscription); Textbook of Natural Medicine; and Chinese Medicine Research Reports.
Professional Journals: HealthWorld Online exclusive online rights to six leading alternative and complementary medicine journals: Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine (nutritional); Journal of Naturopathic Medicine; Quarterly Review of Natural Medicine; HerbalGram: The Journal of the American Botanical Council; and two homeopathic journals, Simillimum: The Journal of the Homeopathic Academy of Naturopathic Physicians, and Resonance: Magazine of The International Foundation of Homeopathy.
Natural Medicine Audio Clinic: Over 200 online Real Audio tapes from leading experts on nutritional, naturopathic, and homeopathic approaches to treating over 60 health conditions.
The Internet: Doctor of the Future?
HealthWorld Online's Internet Health Network was created to promote a Self-Managed Care (approach to maintaining health and wellness through online access to a wide range of consumer-friendly information resources, products and services, online health education, a strong emphasis on self-care, as well as an increased access to resources on natural health care and alternative/complementary medicine. We believe that the Self-Managed Care focus on promoting health and wellness can help reverse the trend of escalating health care costs for chronic illness, saving billions annually in health care expenditures and raising the general level of health in our country.
Former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, in his 1988 Report on Nutrition and Health, pointed out that "dietary imbalances" are the leading preventable contributors to premature death in the U.S. and recommended the expansion of nutrition and lifestyle-modification education for all health care professionals."4 This is borne out by the Centers for Disease Control which state that 54% of heart disease, 37% of cancer, 50% of cerebrovascular disease and 49% of atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) is preventable through lifestyle modification.5
With the cost of high-tech medicine spiraling out of control and managed care organizations stuggling to drive down the cost of health care delivery, there is a rapid migration to out-patient care in the home setting. In fact, home care is the fastest growing sector of the health care industry. The Internet's ability to deliver health information and services directly in the home is a marriage waiting to happen.
Self-Managed Care (is highly appealing to consumers and policy-makers as a new direction for our health care system. A recent survey by NBC News found that over 62% of Americans made a New Year's resolution to improve their health in 1997. Self-Managed Care emphasizes health and well-being, consumer empowerment, and increased utilization of natural remedies and alternative medicine services, which are generally less invasive and more cost-effective for common conditions as well as chronic disorders. The demanding baby-boomer population, many of whom are now managing their own health as well as the health of their children and aging parents, are opting for less-invasive, natural approaches to health and well-being as their primary strategy, tending to avoid the medical system in non-emergent cases.
Self-care information and resources abounds on the Internet, which is only appropriate for Americans as we have a deeply ingrained tradition of self-reliance dating back to Thoreau at Walden Pond and to our Founding Fathers. Tom Ferguson, M.D., father of the medical self-care movement, author of Health Online, sees the Internet as the ultimate vehicle to bring information about self-care practices and self-help resources to individuals worldwide--providing the means for people to effectively take more responsibility for their health.
Resources on nutrition, fitness, mind/body health practices, stress management, yoga, qigong, meditation and spirituality can all contribute to developing a higher level of health and wellness. HealthWorld Online's Wellness Center, <%=domain%>/wellness offers an integrated set of resources to help support individuals in developing a wellness-based lifestyle Users can listen to guided meditations, visualizations or relaxation exercises via Real Audio technology (real-time stress reduction on the Internet while sitting at your computer during a work break); find the latest fitness tips to help you with your workout program or to deal effectively with a nagging shoulder injury; play stress reducing games online; receive meditation instructions; or consult a resource for endless healthy recipes and dietary programs. Our wellness focus provides a worldwide, 24-hour a day resource to assist individuals in staying in peak condition physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually.
Consumer and professional demand for information on different forms of traditional medicine from around the world (often referred to as "alternative" or "complementary" medicine) has risen dramatically in the past five years. This information--once difficult for mainstream consumers to access--is now only a click of the mouse away on the Internet. To meet this demand, HealthWorld Online has developed the most comprehensive Alternative & Complementary Center on the Internet with over 15,000 pages of consumer-friendly, free access information on the fields of mind/body medicine, nutritional medicine, herbal medicine, homeopathy, chiropractic, acupuncture and Chinese Medicine, Ayurveda, and naturopathic medicine. The Alternative & Complementary Medicine Center in HealthWorld Online (www.alternativemedicine.net) also includes valuable databases for professionals, researchers, and health-saavy consumers including Nutritional Influences on Illness, a 3,000 page database compiled by Melvyn Werbach, MD of the UCLA School of Medicine, which profiles the nutritional research from leading medical journals worldwide on over 110 health conditions.
HealthWorld Online is a model for developing a flexible online resource center which can serve multiple markets. Our network was initially designed to serve growing consumer and professional demand for information, products and services relating to Self-Managed Care. Over the past two years, in building a solid foundation of content and unique, interactive information services, we have also anticipated demand from HMOs, hospitals and corporate wellness programs for customized intranet systems to meet the same demands from their subscribers, employees, and professionals. In essence, companies will receive customized "health villages" to meet their particular needs, whether it be an intranet for employees or HMO subscribers, continuing education courses and research databases for health professionals in nutrition, wellness and alternative/complementary therapies, or information support for Self-Managed-Care information and resources for delivery of hospital out-patient services.
HealthWorld Online currently offers dozens of unique, precedent-setting resource centers and services to consumers and health professionals through its global health village. Following are examples of the key information/resource centers in HealthWorld Online which may be utilized to form the information base and user interface (customized village) for a corporate intranet for a health industry business.
The following original HealthWorld Online database services may be adapted to the needs of individual intranets. Services such as Medline and the daily health news feed, for example, would need to be sub-contracted through HealthWorld Online from the original vendor.
All premium services are utilized online via secure credit card transaction. In the case of intranets, these services could be contracted on a pay as you go basis or with a usage cap.
In addition to the thousands of free access documents in HealthWorld Online, we offer premium content including professional research texts such as Nutritional Influences on Illness and A Textbook of Natural Medicine, as well as six alternative and complementary medicine journals. All premium content may be purchased online with CyberCash. Click here to Get the CyberCash Wallet.
In providing comprehensive health information, products and services to consumers and health professionals through direct Internet access and to employee groups and HMO subscribers through corporate intranets, the Internet is postioned to greatly improve the delivery of health information worldwide and to provide the resources to help individuals design a wellness-based lifestyle. Is the Internet the "Doctor of the Future" prophesized by Thomas Edison? Probably not. Technology will never replace the human element of healing. However, as an interactive agent for promoting Self-Managed Care, the Internet will act as a "Doctor of the Future" as the most direct and effective means of achieving Edison's goals of educating patients in the maintenance of the human frame, in diet and in the prevention of disease.
James Strohecker is President and Co-founder of HealthWorld Online (<%=domain%>) and co-author of four books on health and wellness. He was Executive Editor of the highly acclaimed Alternative Medicine: The Definitive Guide and is co-author and editor of Natural Healing for Depression: Solutions from the World's Great Health Traditions and Practitioners, Putnam Perigee, 1999.