CLOSE UP With Marjorie Martin, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Everyday Health
BY JON BRULLOTHS

The Everyday Health Network attracts over 26 million unique monthly users across 24 sites. The Everyday Health Network seeks to inspire and support users' goals and their progress and to provide expert guidance and daily tools users need to make the best health choices, actively manage their conditions, and live healthier lives. The Everyday Health Network is owned and operated by Waterfront Media. 

Martin leads the editorial and product strategy for the Everyday Health Network of Websites, including Everyday Health, Revolution Health, and Care Pages. PM360 talked to her about user trends, mobile platforms, Twitter, and swine flu, among other hot topics.

PM360: How has Everyday Health grown in the last year?
Marjorie Martin: Everyday Health has roughly doubled its audience, an 80% to 90% growth. We’ve accomplished this in several ways: high-profile mergers such as the Everyday Health Network and Revolution Health; strategic review of the new properties to determine our strongest course of action—whether to merge them or maintain them as separate sites; and growing our audience by publishing more content to the site, improving search optimization, enabling more people to find our content through research.

One of the properties that we merged was Health Talk, which provided chronically ill users with very high-quality health information, including Webcasts, podcasts, and videos. We incorporated their fantastic assets into Everyday Health to maximize the depth and audience appeal of this user resource.

Revolution Health itself is valuable as a separate site, and we’re maintaining it as such. Care Pages is another site that we’ve chosen to maintain. It appeals to families who are undergoing a significant health crisis and provides them with support, social networking, and functionality.

What user trends do you see on Everyday Health as a whole?
Users have progressed from searching for disease definitions to exploring symptom information, and most recently, to looking for healthcare providers online. Providers are realizing this is a really important area, and we strongly feel that we have an obligation to help people find the right provider, especially if we’ve given them information they need to discuss with a provider. Market research shows good growth in this new area of users researching healthcare providers online. We have started to roll out things along the healthcare continuum to this end—we feel it’s the next big step.

I’m optimistic this trend’s growth will have a positive impact on the overall health of the nation because our patients will be able to establish better relationships with their providers. If people have a close relationship with their providers, they feel aligned with them, they’ll likely become more compliant with both lifestyle and medication.

What we’re trying to do is help patients become better partners in their care. Being a more informed patient includes knowing what type of health provider is going to be the best fit. The other important thing that is happening nationally is the Obama Administration is starting to talk seriously about healthcare reform, and we feel it should be part of the conversation.

How would Everyday Health participate in that conversation—and what is it that you’d like to say?
We feel the far end of the health continuum—healthcare delivery—is very important. Thus far we have rolled out a comprehensive directory of 700,000 physicians and 600,000 allied health providers—everything from nurse practitioners to nurse midwives, as well as dentists and hospitals.

We are layering in information beyond the standard listing. We’re encouraging users to rate their physicians on the elements of their experience that impact healthcare and are therefore of value—and we’re reaching out to the physician community on this because we realize that’s a point of sensitivity. How it could fit into healthcare reform is to prepare our users by empowering them—helping them focus on qualitative information, including cost. The healthcare reform process has just begun, so it’s a little hard to discuss that in greater detail.

How has reader or participant usage changed in the last year?
Users are engaging on a daily basis around the health management tools, and for more prolonged periods of time per visit. These users are coming directly to actively manage some aspect of their health. They often become part of a community, which becomes a more important part of their lives. We are delighted!

Seeing the tools’ daily utilization increase, we have responded by building new functionality to layer in other opportunities for our users. For instance, we’ve incorporated blood sugar tracking, emotional state tracking, and more, along with our calorie counter tool, which is being transformed into a more comprehensive health management tool.

We think emotional health is a very important component of health. Motivated, happy people who feel good about themselves are typically more compliant around a lot of other things. On the other hand, if people are feeling defeated and discouraged about their diabetes, for instance, other things may start to fall off as well.

What forward-looking things are you working on?
The higher-level view is that we’re investing a lot of resources right now to upgrade some of the experiences that already exist on our site. Our calorie counter is one good example: So many relationships are happening around that product. It’s a major focus for our users; many people go there; and many establish memberships there. So we ask our users, “How do we make it better?” They’re vocal, and we look very closely at many of the requests that come in every day, and we listen to them!

Another important experience that we’re upgrading is the comprehensive healthcare directory. We’re inviting physicians to contribute information about themselves and their practices, and we’re enhancing the hospital information that we have.

In other words, a gastroenterologist might focus almost exclusively on Crohn’s disease patients—that would be a great thing to put in our directory because it helps everybody. Patients find the specialists they need, and specialists attract the patients they can best help.

We aim to encourage users to research hospitals: We’re including quality ratings, patient experiences, and other qualitative information, so that our users can choose the best resource for their needs. We talk to hospitals, as well. And they would love to know that they were chosen based on the thorough research that a patient has done.

Are you tailoring features specifically for mobile Web media platforms like the iPhone, Palm Pre, or Windows Mobile?
We are definitely moving into mobile. The iPhone browser functionality has revolutionized that space. I don’t think any of us anticipated that the mobile Web would prove so popular, accessible, and robust—this quickly. We’ve partnered in that space with a technology group that specializes in mobile.

I’m not ready to tell you much about that endeavor yet—though I’ll be happy to tell you more when we’re closer to rolling out the new products [she chuckles]. I can tell you the products are things we think are much more
useful to have on a handheld device than they are on a desktop.

Does Twitter have a place in your growth strategy?
It does. In the last six months it has just exploded in terms of the health conversation, and we’ve had some interesting strategy conversations here regarding the Twitter experience expansion. We have an obligation to reach out to our users where they want us to be.

How has the historic H1N1 pandemic declaration, made by the World Health Organization this June, affected Everyday Health?
The public has definitely responded. The real U.S. public interest trigger point was Janet Napolitano’s White House press conference announcing that we have a health crisis. We had a triage team create and immediately publish a special coverage page to the site. The traffic was up by thousands of percentage points.

We generate page click-maps in addition to the other standard monitoring metrics. Click-maps show click-density using color. When we took a look at the flu page for the first time, the entire map turned the darkest shade there is—ultimate utilization! I’ve never seen a page look like that before.

The appetite for information has been phenomenal. People were clearly very interested in getting as much information as they could. They were clicking on every single item on the page. No matter how much we refreshed it, it would turn dark almost instantly on this click-map image.