Healthline

For the bus rapid transit line in Cleveland, see HealthLine.

Healthline Media

Type of business	Subsidiary
Founded	1999; 25 years ago (1999)[1] (as YourDoctor.com)
Headquarters	San Francisco, California & New York, New York, United States
Owner	Healthline Media (Red Ventures)
Products	Health information services
Employees	279 (2018)
URL	www.healthline.com

Healthline Media, Inc. is an American website and provider of health information headquartered in San Francisco, California. It was founded in 1999, and purchased by Red Ventures in 2019.

Description

Healthline Media runs healthline.com, which publishes health and wellness information.^[2] It also has provided health content to third party websites. In 2010, Healthline Media signed an agreement to provide medical and health-related content to Yahoo! Health.^[3] Other partners have included AARP.com, The Dr. Oz Show web site,^[4] and insurance company Aetna.^[5]

A 2020 study of readability ranked Healthline the second hardest to read (highest education level required) among the top five Google search results for "phenylketonuria", excluding Wikipedia.^[6]

History

Healthline Media was founded in 1999 by endocrine specialist James Norman as YourDoctor.com.^[4] In 2006, the company re-launched as Healthline Networks.^[7]

In 2011, Healthline was reported to be losing money because it was licensing its content from others. The company invested $1 million to develop its own content.^[8] By 2013, it had over $21 million in revenue and 105 employees, with offices in New York City and San Francisco.^[7] Deloitte ranked Healthline Media as one of the top 500 fastest-growing technology companies in North America from 2010 to 2013.^[9]

In January 2016, Healthline raised $95 million in growth equity financing through Summit Partners.^[10][8] Under the terms of the agreement, Healthline's media business was established as a standalone entity with David Kopp as CEO. The firm acquired the health news website Medical News Today and reference website MediLexicon in May 2016.^[11]

In July 2019, Healthline was acquired by Red Ventures. In August 2020, Healthline acquired Psych Central.^[12]

Reception

While some writers have used terms like "reliable"^[13] to describe Healthline, others have questioned both the quality of its content and its usability and readability.

For example, the site Health News Review said a Healthline article about a new medication used promotional language copied from the drug-maker's press release, neglected to cite side effects, and framed the drug's claimed benefits in misleading language that failed to accurately reflect the evidence in a peer-reviewed medical journal.^[14][15] Another news reviewer noted that an article on depression cited studies that had not been peer-reviewed, but provided "multiple perspectives from both within and outside the research articles" without exaggeration.^[16]

In a study using coverage of neck pain to evaluate a tool designed to review health websites, researchers from the University of Brighton gave Healthline a score of "good". In particular, the website received high marks in areas such as accuracy, readability, disclosure of sources and ownership, and usability, with lower scores in areas such as comprehensiveness and accessibility.^[17]

Healthline's quality has been assessed as falling towards the middle of health information websites. A study of top-ranking health websites published in 2021 evaluated its quality as "good", lower than MedlinePlus's "excellent" scores but higher than affiliate Medical News Today's "fair/good" ranking.^[18] It is included on Wikipedia's spam blacklist due to its publication of misinformation.^[19]

References

1. "YourDoctor.com WHOIS, DNS, & Domain Info – DomainTools". WHOIS. Retrieved July 20, 2016.
2. Tedeschi, Bob (January 23, 2006). "This Site Knows a Cold Isn't a Rock Band". The New York Times. Retrieved January 23, 2006.
3. Helft, Miguel (April 1, 2010). "Yahoo Teams Up with Healthline". Bits (blog). The New York Times. Retrieved April 1, 2010.
4. Roush, Wade. "Healthline Battles WebMD With Personalized Medical Search Tools, Body Maps". Xconomy. Retrieved November 30, 2011.
5. Kolbasuk McGee, Marianne. "Aetna Taps Healthline for Patient Portal". Information Week. Retrieved March 29, 2011.
6. Marsh, Jessie M.; Dobbs, Thomas D.; Hutchings, Hayley A. (October 2020). "The readability of online health resources for phenylketonuria". Journal of Community Genetics. 11 (4): 451–459. doi:10.1007/s12687-020-00461-9. ISSN 1868-6001. PMC 7475157. PMID 32221843.
7. "Healthline Networks, Inc". InsideView. Archived from the original on December 18, 2013. Retrieved December 18, 2013.
8. Sluis, Sarah: "How A Focus On Quality And Discipline Revived Healthline Media", April 17, 2019, AdExchanger.com, retrieved November 15, 2020.
9. "Technology Fast 500". Deloitte. Archived from the original on December 19, 2013.
10. Healthline Media Raises Growth Financing from Summit Partners http://www.summitpartners.com/news/healthline-media-raises-growth-financing-from-summit-partners
11. Healthline Media Grows Digital Reach with Acquisition of #1 Website for Medical News Information https://www.prweb.com/releases/healthline_media_grows_digital_reach_with_acquisition_of_1_website_for_medical_news_information/prweb13368746.htm
12. "Healthline Media Acquires PsychCentral, Bolstering Healthline's Role as the Top Digital Health Publisher" (Press release). Businesswire. August 14, 2020. Retrieved September 24, 2020.
13. Hayawi, K.; Shahriar, S.; Serhani, M. A.; Taleb, I.; Mathew, S. S. (February 1, 2022). "ANTi-Vax: a novel Twitter dataset for COVID-19 vaccine misinformation detection". Public Health. 203: 23–30. doi:10.1016/j.puhe.2021.11.022. ISSN 0033-3506. PMC 8648668. PMID 35016072.
14. Victory, Joy (March 28, 2018). "When 'fact-checked' health news doesn't tell the whole story". HealthNewsReview.org. Archived from the original on December 3, 2020.
15. Schwitzer, Gary (September 19, 2019). "Why fact-checking alone often fails us on health care topics". Center for Health Journalism. Archived from the original on February 4, 2021.
16. Manouchehri, Kimya; Schmid, Julia (February 26, 2020). "Healthline uses multiple perspectives to illuminate findings related to neurological influences on depressive disorders". SciFeye. Archived from the original on February 12, 2021.
17. Zubiena, Luke; Lewin, Olivia; Coleman, Robert; Phezulu, James; Ogunfiditimi, Gbemisola; Blackburn, Tiffany; Joseph, Leonard (August 1, 2023). "Development and testing of the health information website evaluation tool on neck pain websites – An analysis of reliability, validity, and utility" (PDF). Patient Education and Counseling. 113: 107762. doi:10.1016/j.pec.2023.107762. ISSN 0738-3991. PMID 37087877.
18. Portillo, Ivan A.; Johnson, Catherine V.; Johnson, Scott Y. (2021). "Quality Evaluation of Consumer Health Information Websites Found on Google Using DISCERN, CRAAP, and HONcode". Medical Reference Services Quarterly (Link is to Preprint Version). 40 (4): 396–407. doi:10.1080/02763869.2021.1987799. ISSN 1540-9597. PMID 34752199. S2CID 243864890.
19. Dupré, Maggie Harrison (February 29, 2024). "Wikipedia No Longer Considers CNET a "Generally Reliable" Source After AI Scandal". Futurism. Retrieved March 1, 2024.

External links

• Official website