Healio.com at 1 year: Record growth, continued innovation

THOROFARE, N.J. — In April 2012, SLACK Incorporated launched Healio.com, a powerful website built on the premise that there was an unmet need related to news and information for medical specialists due to the convergence of medicine. Since then, Healio.com has successfully met that need for deep, personalized specialty content combined with easy access to the breadth of medical specialty news, peer-review content and education.

Healio.com is distinguished from other medical news sites by its specialty level focus. General medical sites are built from a broad, primary care perspective and then attempt to build out into key specialty areas. Site navigation is constructed to fit this focus.

“Because of SLACK’s history as a specialty publisher, Healio.com was constructed the other way around,” said John C. Carter, Chief Operating Officer of The Wyanoke Group. “We built Healio.com to function the way a specialist or subspecialist approaches content, which then facilitates the surfacing of related content, such as diabetes information from our publication Endocrinology Today surfacing for our Cardiology Today audience.”

Healio.com traffic has exceeded initial expectations. In March 2012, the combined traffic of all SLACK Incorporated websites was estimated at 1 million pageviews. The goal at launch was to equal that traffic by the end of year one. By Oct. 31, 2012, the site topped 1 million monthly pageviews, and by Nov. 29, 2012, it had already exceeded its projected first-year traffic goal. As Healio.com approached its 1-year anniversary, it had exceeded the initial goal by 27.57% with 1,331,219 pageviews in March 2013.

Healio.com integrates content from 40 print publications and 17 specialized online news feeds written and edited by a SLACK Incorporated team of in-house, award-winning medical journalists and editors who will cover more than 130 medical meetings this year throughout the world. The Healio.com audience can experience medical meeting reporting through a personalized content engine, powered by user registration, which delivers a window of links unique to that user’s interest wherever he or she browses in Healio.com.

During the website’s creation, a team of SLACK Incorporated editors and developers mapped the new site, moved more than 15 years of archives, created sophisticated and interactive Education Lab and CME features, merged e-commerce and launched news feeds in six new specialties not featured in existing print publications: gastroenterology, hepatology, psychiatry, pediatrics, dermatology and rheumatology.

“Launching and growing Healio.com has been a labor of love for employees throughout The Wyanoke Group. Our success is directly linked to the ongoing efforts of our staff and their commitment to publishing the best specialty specific news, information and education in health care through Healio.com,” said Peter Slack, CEO/President of The Wyanoke Group.