Medscape has updated its CBSHealthWatch.com consumer health portal.
Medscape has enhanced its consumer health website, CBSHealthWatch.com, to offer consumers a more user-friendly online experience, with improved interactivity and personalization. A new home page with ‘Smart Search’, an enhanced search engine for easier navigation, hopes to attract and retain users by helping them quickly to locate information that meets their specific needs, such as gender and age specificity and complexity of information desired.
This move by Medscape is representative of the direction that consumer eHealth services must move in order to keep up with rising consumer expectations. As consumers are becoming increasingly familiar with the Internet, their expectations of websites are rising and sites that do not meet these expectations will quickly fall from popularity. A recent survey by the Boston Consulting group has found that 77% of consumers who are searching for health information online are looking for answers to a specific question and they are more than two-and-a-half times more likely to look to a general search engine for their answer than they are to look on a health portal site.
The reason is likely to be that search engines provide the ability to pinpoint specific answers, whereas although most health portal sites provide extensive content, they offer less advanced search engines to help consumers find what they are looking for. It is likely that more consumer content sites and health portals will respond to consumer demands with more advanced search capabilities.
Pharmaceutical companies should prioritize their presence on search engines, as well as their placement on health portal sites, to ensure that they are meeting evolving consumer needs. They should also make certain that their own search engines are capable of pinpointing answers to specific questions consumers ask.
