Health Union, an online health information and social media company, announced the launch of its first website —Migraine.com—intended to foster “interactions about health conditions between and among patients, caregivers, professionals and providers.”
Health Union was co-founded last August by Tim Armand, most recently an executive product director for Avandia at GlaxoSmithKline.
The website features original content posted by bloggers and physicians, and registered members are free to converse with Migraine.com’s stable of paid bloggers about symptoms, drug regimens, adverse events and other headache-related topics. Facebook users can discuss content posted on Migraine.com through the site’s Facebook page.
Migraine.com launched quietly in December and officially today, and has over 5,300 Facebook “likes” so far.
Tim Armand, co-founder and managing director, said Migraine.com will feature two new pieces of content each day. Physicians editing written content for accuracy receive a fee for service payment, but are not paid for posting new content. The site has 500 pages of content so far, much of it written by Otesa Miles, a former FDA and healthcare reporter for Dow Jones.
Armand said advertising can be done contextually around user-generated content, or in a multi-page “walled off” area of the site accessible by clicking on a banner. The company is promoting the site through Facebook, where users can register to comment and post on the Migraine.com Facebook page. Drug discussions, positive and negative, are occurring on the site, and four patient advocates employed by Health Union help to moderate posts, said Armand.
The site also features tools for migraine sufferers, such as a migraine journal, symptom quiz, and a number of prescription drug coupons, such as $35 off AstraZeneca’s Zomig, and a discount on Ortho-McNeil’s Axert prescriptions.
The Migraine.com site and format is “replicable,” said Armand, and Health Union will launch new sites in other therapeutic areas this year.
From the April 01, 2011 Issue of MM+M - Medical Marketing and Media
