Health insurers find surge in use of sites.

The past few months have seen major insurers across the country and in the San Fernando Valley upgrading their Web sites in order to give members more resources to manage their health, and while it may be too early to say what long-term impact the improvements will have, patients are flocking to the sites.

For the last several months, Health Net has been heavily promoting its Decision Power program, a service that allows members to keep track of their health information, research conditions and treatments and talk to a personal health coach about medical decisions.

"We are seeing a steady increase in our overall Web traffic," said Health Net spokesman Brad Kieffer. "Much of that increase can be attributed to Decision Power, which offers personalized health coaching and other services. We've been promoting it pretty heavily among our customers for about the previous year or so."

The first generation of interactive Web tools for members on many of these Web sites were services like hospital comparisons. Although useful, patients are now looking for much more personal information for just about any medical question they can think of. Web site usage data suggests efforts to offer more personalized information is working.

Kieffer said that Health Net saw the number of registered users on its Web site double in 2005. Registered users can get information as basic as copayment schedules and drug formularies or its more involved, personalized health coaching. More than 80 percent of Decision Power users, he said, have said their experience was a positive one, and Health Net is hoping that eventually more patients will get into the habit of doing online research before appointments.

Health plans are of course aware that some of the most expensive medical conditions, like diabetes and heart disease, can be brought on and sustained by lifestyle choices. They're also very expensive to treat. Health plans are betting that if patients can't be counted on to make regular doctor appointments, today's computer savvy patients may be more amenable to logging onto a Web site to discover their health risks and set up an online fitness program.

In some cases, members can set up their own Web sites in order to monitor their activities and hopefully prevent serious health problems.

WellPoint, represented in Southern California by its subsidiary Blue Cross of California, provides online health information to its 34 million patients with a group of sites that it runs in partnership with WebMD Health. WebMD's library of over 20,000 articles is available to WellPoint members. The Web site directs users to the most pertinent information, and then takes things a step further by allowing members to develop a fitness program.

Dr. Michael Belman, Medical Director for Quality Management at WellPoint West Region, said the goal of the new Web site is to make sure patients aren't spending too much time looking for the information that's pertinent to them.

"The new generation (Web site) aims to personalize health information further," Belman said. "It's really designed so that rather than have people hunting around for a piece of information, (the Web site) will push the information to people coming to the site."

Belman said the Web site's function that allows patients to keep a virtual health record of information like family disease history and past treatments could eventually be integrated with physician records to allow members an even more accurate health picture, although that idea is not definite yet.