Medicover goes on line with largest Polish health portal
Medicover, a leading private health care provider, plans to go on line by January with an interactive service in a move to be the largest Polish health portal on the web, the Business Journal has learned.
Initially, the site will target the company's 45,000-strong database of current and former patients, but the plans are to market it more widely as a health-care portal site that everyone could use.
"We want this to be the central access point for all health-related searches in Poland," said Michael Fotheringham, Medicover's international IT director, who is spearheading the project.
The site will be completely bilingual in English and Polish, and feature services such as on-line reservations at the company's 15 clinics nationwide and links to health care and support organizations such as Alcoholics Anonymous.
The site will replace the company's existing site, www.medicover.com. That site, online since 1997, was the first health care site in Poland, but the company wants the new site to become much more interactive, as the existing site only features information about the company.
The new site should be on line by January, Fotheringham said. Eventually it will feature health care-related content such as the latest medical research and resources so that visitors to the site can learn about whatever ails them from bunions to breast cancer. Medicover plans to cooperate with Polish teaching hospitals and university medical centers to generate content. The site will also feature community message boards and online discussion groups and chat rooms focusing on health-related issues.
The company would not say how much it intends to spend on the site, but Fotheringham did say the company expects it to be a "cost center rather than a profit center" for Medicover.
The announcement comes just as competition in the field of online medical advice is heating up. The American Medical Association (AMA) last week announced the creation of a new internet company, medem.com, that will publish consumer information on health care and help doctors set up their own medical web sites to communicate with patients via e-mail. Other popular medical sites include DrKoop.com, Healtheon, Medscape, as well as 17,000 other World Wide Web sites devoted to health care information.
But Medicover.com would be the first such site in Polish. Web sites of Medicover's competition, such as Falck (www.falck.com.pl), Lux-Med. (www.
supermedia.pl/klienci/luxmed) and Centrum Medyczne (www.cm-lim.com.pl) are, like Medicover's current site, only informational brochures about the company. However, one Warsaw clinic, Szpital Damiana (www.damian.com.pl) already allows users to make reservations with doctors on line.
Despite the limited net use in Poland today, Medicover sees huge growth potential here, and estimates that 2-3% of Poles use the internet today. "The window of opportunity is now," said Fotheringham.
