Jeff Arnold launches ‘next generation WebMD'

By Rodney Ho

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

During the Web boom of the late ’90s, Atlanta’s Jeff Arnold became a media darling thanks to his company WebMD, a portal of health information for consumers and the medical community. He also had a good sense of timing, selling out to Healtheon in 1999 before the tech crash.

A decade later, Arnold is back in the health-care game with the creation of Sharecare, a Web-based health information platform he hopes will be more intuitive and useful than his original creation.

“This is like a next generation WebMD,” Arnold said in a phone interview. “We want to answer literally hundreds of thousands of medical questions.”

While WebMD might provide only one answer to a particular medical question, Arnold said Sharecare hopes to access multiple sources to provide readers a variety of points of view.

For instance, if you ask why you have dry skin, Dr. Mehmet Oz might provide an answer, the Cleveland Clinic might give its perspective, then a possible Web site sponsor Dove could throw in some thoughts. More useful answers will rank higher among the results.

The site, he said, will also feature social networking opportunities for consumers, doctors and medical organizations.

To create Sharecare, Arnold teamed with Dr. Oz, a cardiac surgeon who recently started his own talk show. It airs locally at 3 p.m. on WXIA-TV and has opened strong, pulling in comparable ratings nationally to the more established “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.”

“We need to harvest our collective IQ,” Oz said in an interview Wednesday. “If we pool ideas, we can get the best ones out there.”

Arnold hopes to launch the site early next year. Currently, Sharecare is building its database of questions and answers.

Fans of Dr. Oz’s show, for instance, have already asked more than 75,000 questions and Sharecare has answers to 12,000 of them so far, Arnold said.

The company also includes media partners such as Sony Pictures, Discovery Communications and Harpo Productions, which creates “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”

Arnold has been running Atlanta-based HowStuffWorks.com, a Web site which explains in layman’s terms how complex things work. The firm was bought by Discovery Communications in 2007.

Arnold recently took on an expanded role as Discovery’s chief of global digital strategy and became HowStuffWorks’ chairman emeritus.

WebMD, now based in New York, generated $12.8 million in profit during the third quarter on revenues of $111.6 million. Its number of unique monthly visitors has grown to 59.2 million, up 27 percent year over year.