Health website Irishhealth.com has recorded the signing on of the site’s 150,000th registered member – that’s the equivalent of 5pc of the entire adult population of Ireland.
The website, which was launched in 2000, records around 300,000 unique visitors a month, including registered and unregistered visitors.
The site, which is owned and operated by MedMedia Group, contains a database of original articles and resources, written and edited by Irish medical professionals and specialist health journalists, running to more than 25,000 articles. It also carries some 112,5000 ‘discussions’ postings from site visitors.
“We see this huge number of registered users as a vote of confidence for what has been a major undertaking for us over the last decade and more,” said John Gibbons, the site’s publisher.
“This translates into around 1,100 new registered members joining us every month for the last 11 years.
“Our registered users have opted to share huge amounts of information about their health interests and concerns in confidence with us and we use this to constantly refine the services we offer to users,” he added.
“Powerful features, such as our award-winning Child Immunisation Tracker, health professional databases and health calculators, as well as an extremely popular user discussions area, have all been developed in response to user feedback.
“We have also developed a number of smartphone apps, including the popular Pollen Alert app and the Immunisation Tracker”.
Pioneering transparency
Irishhealth.com also pioneered transparency and patient empowerment for users of the multi-billion euro Irish hospital system with the launch of its innovative ‘Rate My Hospital’ website more than five years ago.
This service was honoured with a major international IT award in Venice in 2007, and today hosts more than 13,000 fully completed 23-part online questionnaires which collectively build into Ireland’s most comprehensive picture of the state of its hospital system, as judged by its most important element – patients and their relatives.
