Monday saw the launch of a new Web portal designed to give consumers easy access to health information and allow them to save their electronic personal health records. 

Sound familiar? It should. The new site, 

 provides services similar to those provided by WebMD, Everyday Health, and 

-but with one major difference: OptumHealth is the health and wellness arm of UnitedHealth Group, one of the largest providers of health benefits, with a customer base of more than 60 million.

“We believe we can package those solutions into direct-to-consumer subscription services that consumers will want to buy directly from us,” said Scott Heimes, senior vice president of consumer solutions at OptumHealth. “That’s why we launched a consumer health portal, and we will add e-commerce transactions to [it] in 2009.” The general site, however, is free of charge. Additional features are available for registered users, but signing up only takes a few minutes.

The consumer health site offers information pages from content providers as well as the site’s in-house editorial team, including thousands of videos and articles-all organized in fairly easy-to-navigate categories. A search engine, courtesy of Healthline Networks, targets health information, weeding out non-medical content. The company also offers symptom, drug, and treatment searches as well as a BMI calculator. 

“Our search is different in that we leverage our taxonomy to deliver a more holistic result based on what the user is searching for,” said Joe Petrosino, vice president of ad sales at Healthline Networks. “Healthline is just about medical searching, because it is the only thing that we do. We also crawl 250,000 medically credible Web sites to get the best health info on the Web.”

The search tool can also contextually target ads on any site within the network. For example, a migraine advertiser can choose to have its ads appear only on pages with migraine content, not general headache content. 

The site currently offers advertising opportunities for pharmaceutical companies; the home page currently carries ads for Seroquel and Humira that lead users to branded sites for the drugs. 


  OptumHealth also includes a personal health records (PHR) tool-not unlike those offered by 

 and Google-that allows users to store their electronic medical records. To sign up for a PHR, users must register for the site. In the future, the company plans to integrate the tool with Microsoft’s Health Vault for ease of use. Users do not need to be UnitedHealth members to use the service; in fact, members are currently unable to move claims from the UnitedHealth site to the PHR service. Heimes said that the ability to move files would eventually be added. 

“We are in the early stages of adoption of personal health records,” he said. “But use is growing rapidly, and as more physicians and health plans make it possible to share heath and medical data in an automatic way, it will create a more robust market and stronger demand for PHRs.”

The big question is: Are there too many online health networks? The social network scene has recently seen backlash against a surplus of options, with people no longer interested in keeping Myspace, Facebook, 

 Friendster accounts. Could the health industry see a similar reaction?

“The thing that separates us is that this is our business,” Heimes told 

. “We already serve 61 million consumers with health and wellness solutions, and we have hundreds of thousands of partners in the space that are part of our team. We are directing that level of expertise to the business of providing solutions to consumers.”

Articles

News Analysis

The already crowded health portal market will get a bit tighter with the addition of myOptumHealth.com. But unlike the other WebMDs of the world (wide Web), Optum comes with a built-in base of 60 million users and the muscle of the UnitedHealth Group.

UnitedHealth Branch Launches Web Portal

Whether you are fond or sick of advertisements that that feature flashy testimonials with fine print that reads “results may vary,” the Federal Trade Commission wants to hear what you think. Last week, the FTC opened to public comment proposed changes to its Endorsement Guides Review, which includes new guidelines regarding testimonials and the use of spokespeople (celebrity or otherwise).

“These are guidance for advertisers as to how to make advertising claims using testimonials without violating section 5 of the FTC Act,” said Mary Engle, associate director for advertising practices at FTC. The guidance originally issued in 1980, is being updated with new examples that bring it into the 21st century.

The commission is concerned about the use of misleading endorsements, particularly in the area of weight-loss advertising with extravagant before and after examples that don’t accurately represent what consumers can reasonably expect to achieve with the product. Under previous guidelines, advertisers could deal with the situation with a simple disclaimer, such as “results not typical.” Under the new guidelines, they will be required to disclose what “typical” is. 


  Another area of the guide explains the need to disclose material connections between an advertiser and an endorser. This includes people who are encouraging the use of a product on their blog or celebrities who appear on a talk show hawking a product, but are actually being paid to endorse it. Under the proposed guidelines, everything must be disclosed.

“We are more concerned with the non-conventional ads, where it seems like a product might come up in casual conversation with a talk show host and it might not be obvious to the audience that the celebrity is under contract with the advertiser,” Engle said.

Pharma companies should pay heed to the section about expert endorsements. If a spokesperson is held out as an expert on a product or a related field, he or she must actually have expertise in that field, and is expected to back up any claims made about the product. Under the new guidelines, Pfizer’s controversial 

While FTC generally defers to FDA about advertising guidelines for pharma ads, the two organizations tend to play nice, and FDA could enact similar guidelines. 

“FDA has primary jurisdiction over prescription drug advertising and OTC labeling, so we would expect each agency to take its usual role. But we do coordinate with each other if we are opening an investigation in an area where the other agency has jurisdiction,” Engle said. “We have a liaison agreement that we operate under to make sure we aren’t duplicating efforts.”

Public comments are open until the end of January. 

The Federal Trade Commission is tightening the rules for who is a paid endorser and what advertisers need to disclose about them. Look for new transparency on payment and new language to replace "your mileage may vary."

Pharmaceutical Executive-12-03-2008

UnitedHealth Branch Launches Web Portal

FTC Proposes Updates to Endorsement Guidelines