Posted by Tom Eng, President and Founder

Consumer demand for high quality, personalized health information is booming and will continue to grow dramatically for the foreseeable future. There are several major reasons for this phenomenon.

One reason is the United States and most other countries in the world are becoming increasingly older and overweight, leading to more people with chronic health conditions. Employers, facing increasing health insurance premiums, are continuing to push employees into consumer-directed health plans that shift responsibility for many aspects of health decision-making to employees. And the exploding volume of biomedical research and discoveries are driving consumers to tools and resources that can help them better understand new medical developments.

The increasing interest in online health information is great and encourages people to become more proactive about their health. According to Pew Internet (pdf), about four out of five consumers looking for online health information use a search engine first. But, as everyone knows from personal experiences, there is a lot of misleading and unreliable health information on the Internet.

At Healia, we strive to provide more focused, more reliable, and more personally relevant search results. We believe health is one of the most challenging—and rewarding—information verticals for search engines to get right.

As a society, we are facing many seemingly insurmountable challenges in healthcare and public health. The US Department of Health and Human Services predicts that health care spending in the United States is projected to reach $4 trillion and 20 percent of GDP by 2015. The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that there are more than one 1 billion overweight adults globally and at least 300 million of them are obese. The health, social, and economic burden of obesity and related chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and cancer is one of the world’s biggest challenges in this century.

At Healia, we thrive on big challenges and we are grateful to be working in an industry where we can help improve global health in a meaningful way. We are constantly thinking about how to enhance our existing search tools and creating new technologies that will help people in their health decision-making processes. We welcome your suggestions. Our goal is to help consumers make better informed health decisions and live healthier lives.

Healia health vertical search obesity global information