RightHealth is right up there in the increasingly crowded field but vibrant field of consumer health sites. It compares nicely with its rivals, MedHelp, Wellsphere, OrganizedWisdom and Healthline.

It even has some richer features in terms of images and user-friendly access to patient education videos than the favored consumer tool of medical librarians, MedlinePlus. Medical librarians and librarians in general are often asked for simple explanations of basic health issues such as heart disease and high blood pressure. We need to familiarize ourselves with the resources to be had at commercial consumer health sites.

And librarians and consumes aren’t the only potential users of RightHealth. Junior high and high school teachers and community college and public health educators could utilize it for simple class and patient education materials. For instance, RightHealth has clearly put a lot of time and money into developing relationships with the name players in health care (e.g., the Mayo Clinic). I liked the little slide show on Hand Exercises for Arthritis, for instance, on the arthritis page:

http://www.righthealth.com/topic/Arthritis

And the articles linked to in PubMed under the rubric Medical Journals were well chosen—pertinent and interesting. Kudos to RightHealth for seamlessly integrating the authoritative richness of PubMed with its own offerings. PubMed is too little known among the general public and RightHealth is to be commended for creating a handsome, easily navigable site that leads to solid resources such as PubMed.

Likewise, it is to be commended for its restraint in the marketing line. Business is business, after all and no one would begrudge profits to well-designed health sites. Unlike the shameless plugs for its own branded products that one sees at Revolution Health, at RightHealth shots of topic-related products appear tastefully at the bottom of the page under the heading, Marketplace. And the products listings on the Arthritis page, at least, were quite tastefully done and aesthetically rather pleasing.

One suggestion for the designers of RightHealth would be to render the name of the site clearer. It doesn’t really stand out on the home page to me.

Similarly, I got rather confused about who was standing behind and who had produced the various health videos on offer. I was whisked away at one point to what appeared to be an outside partner purveyor of video and on the arthritis page what I thought would be a video was actually a JPEG, which was useful but not what I was trying to access.

I then tried my favored search term when trying out a health site and as usual I misspelled the search term but got the useful question, “Did you mean amyotrophic lateral sclerosis?” which is always a sign that a health site is well engineered. That is, it didn’t simply reject my inquiry, as even good old PubMed sometimes does.

There were some good things there, but the editor’s picks were a bit iffy. We are told, “Good article by the American Academy of Family Physicians.” But the article linked to is dated 1999 and there has been a lot of research done on ALS since then.

One quite useful feature that sets RightHealth apart from its rivals is that on some pages it links to white papers via www.scribd.com on such topics as drug development. That is something that health science students and budding researcher/entrepreneurs could make use of. You have to register with Scribd to download the full document and this feature needs a little bit of polishing by both Scribd and RightHealth. But it is marvelous to be able to gain insights into industry research on the disease you are interested in and more and more patients are proactive on that front.

Not everything is perfect at RightHealth. I tried “Other Names” for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and “motor neuron disease” was not listed, as it should have been. And one of the fora for ALS seems to have been stagnating since 2006. There was no link to the much more active and current, Patients Like Me.

And why is “house dust” under “drug” on the asthma page? Calling human resources — hire some medical librarians to help with categorization.

Still, RightHealth is on the right track in terms of adding new content (e.g., anatomical images and videos). It needs to work on enabling users to get to its own home page—it tends to rely on a lot of linking out, to the detriment of its own brand. But so far, so good.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 22nd, 2008 at 10:23 am and is filed under Alts, Reviews, Verticals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.