Today, WebMD (where I work) announced that it has acquired Physicians' Online. Wow, what a long strange trip it has been! I started out in the Medical Internet field in 1995, just a greenhorn out of business school at Physicians' Online in Tarrytown, NY. Back then the service was an ingenious use of graphical bulletin board software that offered docs free access to Medline while presenting ads along the bottom of the screen for pharma companies. Yes, that's right. We were an ad supported online service before Wired sold their first banner, before Netscape went public, before Windows 95 (I can't describe to you how many times I tried to talk a doc through installing winsock).
I left POL in 1997 after helping to launch it's first email application, it's first discussion group application, it's physician recruiting business and transitioning from a goofy software platform called "Coconut" (I believe Peapod was the only other business using it. Remember, this was pre-web, folks) to all HTML. We were really the only company to make a go of it as a professionally oriented content and ISP business and I'm proud to say we provided the first exposure to the Internet for many, many doctors.
In 1996, we watched from POL as Medscape launched ("Competition! This must be a real business") and now here I am, reunited with the service that started it all. It's actually a good matchup after all this time. Medscape's industry-leading content, CME and newsletters, combined with what is still an amazingly vibrant online community of physicians. Who said there's no fun on the Net anymore? ;-)
I remember meeting a VC at a health care IT conference in 1996 or 7 who told me that her two favorite small companies in the then as yet unnamed eHealth space were Physicians OnLine and MedicaLogic. Well I guess WebMD has ended up with one and half of them. I hope the VC got out early (although i'm sure she never made anything out of POL!)
Posted by: Matthew Holt | January 28, 2004 at 02:07 PM
Don't forget HPOL and the Coconut Web Browser in your personal POL-accomplishments nostalgia. Was it really 1997?
Posted by: Jack Scheffel | January 29, 2004 at 04:04 PM