Revolution Health Group has reduced its staff by 50 employees as the online consumer health company reshuffles for the second time in eight months.
“We had some natural synergies that made sense to consolidate.” Revolution Health spokesman Brad Burns told MM&M. “Last October we had about 180 employees and today we’re at about 200.”
Burns noted that the latest Revolution Health staff reduction was “primarily due to a reorganization,” following Revolution Health’s HealthTalk acquisition last December. Previously, last October, Revolution Health laid off 60 employees at its Revolution Health Networks division.
Revolution Health’s CEO is entrepreneur and America Online founder Steve Case, who has been banking on pharma marketers to help him build an online healthcare empire with his consumer-friendly web platform.
But Case has publicly lamented the pharmaceutical industry’s hesitation to embrace interactive marketing and inject a greater share of promotional budget into online initiatives.
“It is astonishing to me how under-invested this industry is in digital media,” Case told delegates at the seventh annual ePharma Summit in Philadelphia in January. “This is crazy.”
Meanwhile, Case has invested millions of dollars of his own fortune and enlisted backing from former Fortune 500 chief executives and former secretary of state Colin Powell to grow the company, which officially launched in April 2007.