How Avvo is Connecting Patients and Doctors via Content

[Update: Avvo has sold its healthcare business to HealthTap as of November 29, 2012 to focus on its legal business.

In the business-to-business (B2B) sector, InfoCommerce Group[1] has been the leading consulting firm that has helped guide traditional directory publishers to transform themselves into online marketplaces that connect buyers and sellers. As my colleague Russell Perkins wrote last week, “Until quite recently, the gold standard was buying guides … that provided buyers with little more than a starting point’.[2]

The same holds true with physician directories-in print and online. Directories of medical professionals that follow the old-model compilations of profiles based on basic descriptive data–including specialty, education, board certifications, which insurance they accept, whether there are any complaints of misconduct–have represented the status quo for some time. The biggest differentiator between most of the competing doctor rating sites has been the availability and quality of user ratings.

Avvo = Blog Network + Doctor Profiles + Ratings 

Avvo, a young company in Seattle that has had success in the legal market, has just expanded into the healthcare market with a new approach to online physician directories.[3] Avvo has done the groundwork of compiling profile and related data from state and national medical boards and insurance company websites for 800,000 doctors, which is essential as a starting point in today’s competitive doctor ratings environment. But Avvo goes further and combines the model of existing doctor ratings sites and physician blog networks.

Content Marketing 

I especially like their use of content as a tool for attracting and engaging consumers. With Avvo, the content is contributed by the doctors who are profiled. Doctors can contribute health information by publishing health guides or by responding to questions submitted by consumers. Because the location of the person asking the question is listed, local doctors have an added incentive to respond to questions by local consumers. At this point in their development, there isn’t too much doctor-contributed content on which to rate the quality or likely success of this “content marketing” approach, but one can look at Avvo’s success in the legal market to gain a better idea of how content marketing helps consumers evaluate legal professionals.

Platform for Physician Blogs 

Physician created online content isn’t a new phenomenon. Leading edge physicians like Dr. Val Jones (DrVal) and Kevin Pho, MD (KevinMD) have been blogging for years and have leveraged their content on social media networks, too. (DrVal has over 4,700 followers on Twitter and KevinMD has over 27,000.) With their own content as anchors, they have built physician blogging networks, GetBetterHealth.com and KevinMD.com , respectively. The blogging networks have become destination sites in their own rite and are even attracting content partners who want to reach the audience that these entrepreneurial doctors have attracted. Just a couple of weeks ago, Harvard Health Publications announced an agreement with the Better Health blog to contribute content to GetBetterHealth.com.

With Aggregated Sites, Size Matters

With aggregators, bigger is better when it comes to findability and search engine optimization (SEO). Avvo excels at SEO and if it succeeds in building a large collection of credible health information, it will create a sort of virtuous circle for contributing doctors: they earn trust based on the good content they write, and over time, content from highly rated doctors gains more credibility. One downside of the content marketing approach to building exposure and credibility: not all good doctors are also good writers. For doctors who prefer to focus on other activities (including seeing patients face-to-face), Avvo could still serve as a platform for recommending content from other doctors or information sources. I’m not sure if this content mediation aspect is already incorporated into the Avvo model (I’ll ask them to respond), but I like the idea. We know from Pew Research that when seeking health information or assistance with medical issues more consumers turn to a health professional than to other sources such as family or the internet, so it follows that content recommended online by one’s physician or another credentialed health professional whose qualifications are readily available would be considered trustworthy by most consumers.

Overall, I see a lot of value in Avvo’s model of providing an aggregated platform for doctors to communicate health information to consumers. By offering SEO and content management services, Avvo relieves the physicians of the need to keep current with web technology and search marketing. Better yet, the content marketing approach provides a ’social media’ aspect that allows consumers to get a more complete picture of a physician than can be gleaned from static profile data. And, for those of you who are asking, “so what’s the business model”? , Avvo relies on contextual advertising and sponsored links, à la Google. By providing healthcare information from trustworthy sources (relevance) and broad coverage of healthcare professionals (size), Avvo clearly understands what it takes to succeed when contextual advertising is the sole revenue model.
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 [1]InfoCommerce Group is the parent company of Health Content Advisors.
 [2]See: http://infocommerce.typepad.com/my-blog/2010/11/buying-and-selling-40.html
 [3]http://avvoblog.com/2010/11/01/avvo-launches-doctors/
 [4]KevinMD is now part of the MedPage Today network of health information sites.
 [5]http://getbetterhealth.com/the-better-health-blog-partners-with-harvard-health-publications/2010.11.11.
 [6]86% of the consumers surveyed by Pew Internet said that they ask a health professional, such as a doctor, when they need information or assistance in dealing with a health or medical issue. See: http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2009/8-The-Social-Life-of-Health-Information/02-A-Shifting-Landscape/3-The-internet-does-not-replace-health-professionals.aspx for more information.