ROUNDUP: FastHealth Launches Health Search Portal
FastHealth Corp., an Alabama-based Internet company, has launched its Web site, www.fasthealth.com, a "health search portal" designed to serve as a launchpad to "thousands of health-related Web sites," the Birmingham News reports. FastHealth functions as a search engine, allowing users to conduct a free search on a particular subject and then connecting them directly to the sources that FastHealth has identified as the best on that topic. The Web site will generate its revenue through advertisements, fees charged to other companies using a version of FastHealth on their own sites and sales from its online stores (Velasco, Birmingham News, 10/20).
AHA Introduces Advice Web Site
The American Heart Association has unveiled a Web site, www.onelife.americanheart.org, which "individually tailors" advice on heart attack and stroke prevention to each user based on his or her personal information. The AP/Las Vegas Sun reports that users logging on to the site enter personal information, including physical activity levels, nutrition, smoking habits, blood pressure, cholesterol and medication compliance, and then receive email messages containing information and advice about preventing heart attacks and strokes. The user's information is kept confidential, although the AHA will use "aggregate data" culled from the site. AHA President Dr. Rose Marie Robinson cautioned that the Web site should not be used in place of seeing a doctor (AP/Las Vegas Sun, 10/20).
The Top 10
To steer Internet users toward useful health information, the Medical Library Association has compiled a list of the 10 best consumer health Web sites, the Chicago Sun-Times reports. The list includes:
- AMA Health Insight at www.ama-assn.org/consumer.htm offers "scientifically accurate" information from the American Medical Association;
- The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Web site at www.cdc.gov contains consumer information about diseases, conditions and other special topics;
- Healthfinder at www.healthfinder.gov/ was developed by the federal government to direct users to "reliable sites";
- HealthWeb at www.healthweb.org provides links to "evaluated, noncommercial, health-related sites";
- HIV InSite at http://hivinsite.ucsf.edu provides a "gateway" to HIV/AIDS information from the University of California-San Francisco;
- Mayo Clinic Health Oasis at www.mayohealth.org contains "easy-to-understand" information on health topics;
- MEDLINEplus, the National Library of Medicine's consumer- oriented site, can be found at www.nlm.nih.gov/medline plus;
- The National Women's Health Information Center, sponsored by the U.S. Public Health Service, is located at www.4women.gov;
- NOAH: New York Online Access to Health at www.noah.cuny.edu lists state, local and federal resources selected by editors and aimed at consumers;
- Oncolink at www.oncolink.upenn.edu contains cancer information from the University of Pennsylvania (Ritter, Chicago Sun-Times, 10/23).