Insurance Companies Get In On The Act

While consumer and government sites provide an abundance of information, don’t forget your health insurance company. Many insurers, including Aetna, Blue Cross, Kaiser Permanente, Prudential, and others, have excellent sites with a great deal of health information. One of the best is InteliHealth from Aetna. Featuring data from the Harvard Medical School, InteliHealth provides news and information, health-related articles, expert advice, weight loss tools, medical and drug dictionaries, a health directory, message boards, and much more. It’s free to everyone, not just Aetna subscribers, and the site takes great pains to assure visitors that it is independent and that content is created by Aetna editors and editors from the Harvard Medical School. Other health insurers are not as ambitious as Aetna, but they do offer resources with information for their customers. Kaiser Permanente, for example, offers HealthMedia, a site that provides basic information about living a healthy life. Several insurance companies don’t have their own Web sites, preferring instead to provide information via WebMD. These providers let subscribers use the vast resources of WebMD for medical information and the WebMD interface to find health-plan–specific information, such as how to find a physician, request replacement ID cards, check the status of claims, change their address, and more.