by Jim Cashel
November 2002
Sandee LaMotte is Director of Community at WebMD.
We asked her views on the challenges of managing health-related communities and
her thoughts on the future.
Tell me about the online communities at WebMD.
WebMD hosts the most vibrant health community on the Internet. We have more than 100 message boards on more than 47 diseases and conditions, as well as numerous lifestyle and wellness topics. Our message boards are consistently the third most popular destination on WebMD, after the home page and search. This means a lot to us here at WebMD, because we know that each of those users is here because his or her life -- or the life of a loved one -- has been affected in some way by a health or illness issue. We love knowing that we are helpful in that search for support and information.
WebMD's health professionals are our ace in the hole. To my knowledge, we are the only health Internet site that contracts with 35 or more MDs, RNs, and PhDs to answer questions from users on the message boards, offering their knowledge and expertise directly to the public. This enables us to help people partner with their doctors in managing their personal health needs. An educated consumer is the best patient a doctor could ask for. Our professionals help meet that goal.
Our message board support groups are fantastic. The members are so inspiring! They are here to share their personal experiences with others, and offer sympathy and advice. We're helping folks who've never shared before -- on, say, herpes or abortion, sex abuse or eating disorders -- open up and begin to heal by sharing their feelings. We are especially impressed with all the many, many wonderful people living with a chronic illness who hold "cyber-hands" with the newly diagnosed, calming fears and offering tips on how to live each day with their new reality.
To support this vibrant message community's thirst for knowledge, we offer weekly live events with national experts, best-selling authors, and top-notch doctors from all the major disease groups and wellness issues. Those live "interviews," conducted by the public they are meant to serve, are then archived on our condition centers for all to read at their convenience.
We also send our weekly or bi-weekly newsletters to more than nine million subscribers on WebMD, MSN, and AOL. Those newsletters carry a good deal of community content, which invariably produces an excellent click-through rate.
