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Healthline.com
Pros: The best feature that Healthline.com offers is its search function, which is displayed, front and center, on the homepage.
Cons: Although you can easily look up a condition, drug, or treatment, there isn’t consistency of information available amongst them. For example, under ‘Acne’ – there is the ‘Welcome’ section and two ‘Topics’ – all have the same description; then there is news, images, articles (the three showing are all named the same thing – ‘Acne’), one item under ‘Tools’, and three ‘Related Topics’. While, under diabetes, there are a variety of descriptions for the several ‘Topics’, there are several in depth articles, some regular articles, a video, a health experts section, books & journals, and five ‘Related Topics’.
The Bottomline: Healthline.com is a promising site, which offers valuable information, but it could definitely benefit from having more comprehensive, consistent information available across all of the conditions listed, and across its search features.
Best of Web Rating:
(3 out of 5)
Reviewed on: August 30, 2009
Healthline.com is a site designed
to help individuals self-manage their healthcare, by offering a variety
of resources to help them make decisions. Things such as drug information,
a physician search, a symptom checklist, articles, and multi-media options
are available. The site aims to be a central place for people, companies,
advertisers, publishers, and other sites to come to use its health-related
resources. Visitors to the site can search information by symptoms, treatments,
drugs, and condition categories. You can learn more about tests, causes,
and diet and exercise options for a given condition. It also has several
blogs, which cover an interesting variety of specific health categories.
Healthline.com is fairly user friendly. Once you type in a condition or symptom, the site will provide a number of categories that a user can drill down into to find out more information. However, the information that the site pulls up by using its search features is different in both content and organization than if you were to click on one of the “top learning centers” (conditions). Using the search feature is helpful to an extent, but it won’t give you the nice organization that the learning centers offer.
The various conditions also have articles associated with them, but the articles do not have unique names to them; they are only identified by repeated references to the category, which means you have to click on each one to find out what it offers.
Navigating the site will take some getting used to due to the lack of consistency amongst the different categories. Just because you can find out various things about one category, doesn’t mean the same selection and depth will be available under a different topic.
Healthline.com is a good site to use to find a physician by specialty, location, gender, and language. It is helpful to be able to look up a specific symptom and see what the possibilities are for its causes. You can also combine a number of symptoms in the same search to narrow the focus even further. It has a good drill-down function, so you can keep finding out additional information on a given topic.
This site will also provide you with both basic and more in depth information in a category, including news, expert advice, alternative therapies, and multi-media options, but this can vary from section to section. It has a great deal of potential to be a comprehensive database of information for various uses in the health-care field, once the consistency issues are improved.
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