Elsevier and a Healthline for Doctors

April 25, 2023 - By Laura Montini

Healthline Networks announced its partnership with medical publisher Elsevier this week, launching Healthline’s largest project in the health care provider market to date.

Elsevier is a huge Amsterdam-based publishing company with more than 7,000 employees in 24 countries. It recently debuted ClinicalKey, a search engine for medical providers, and Healthline worked closely with Elsevier to develop the underlying technology for the tool.

“The interesting thing about this is people thought of Healthline’s platform as very consumer-centric,” West Shell III, CEO of Healthline Networks said. “And it is.”

But what’s under the hood of Healthline’s platform is also well-suited to support Elsevier’s vast amount of medical resources, West said. ClinicalKey draws answers from Elsevier’s more than 700 textbooks and 400 medical journals. And Healthline adds its own collection of information ― more 250 million web pages worth.

Shell said the collaboration fits with Healthline’s long-term market opportunity, which is helping doctors and patients to speak the same language. One way to get the two groups on the same page is to get doctors and patients reading the same pages. Healthline’s consumer information added to ClinicalKey is based on the same medical literature doctors read anyway.

“It’s exactly where the market’s going ― fundamentally, being able to raise the health literacy of the consumer so they can have an intelligent dialog with their physician and take control of and really understand what they need to do to better manage their health,” Shell said.

ClinicalKey is the first of a broader set of tools Elsevier will build out, and Healthline hopes to create consumer-oriented applications on top of the platform.