• by Joan Voight , May 14, 2010

Dr. Mehmet Oz and Oprah Winfrey are itching to get into the burgeoning world of health social media. But true to form, they want to do it in their own controlled way. 

Oz is partnering with Winfrey's company Harpo Productions, Discovery Communications and Jeff Arnold, who founded WebMD and left in 2000, on a new Web site that will provide crowd-sourced and edited answers to user-submitted health questions. The answers will come from celebrity physicians, hospitals, high-profile health authors, local health providers, brand sponsors and other users. Sharecare.com is due to launch at the end of summer; its first sponsor is Unilever's Dove, which is providing about 2,000 branded answers about skin care.

Originally, the Sharecare site intended to incorporate users' answers as they were posted, much the same as Patientslikeme.com, MedHealth.com and WebMD's Health Exchange. But Oz and his partners recently shifted gears, says Sharecare's CMO, Dawn Whaley.  "We decided to focus on the quality, not the quantity of user comments" with a rigorous filtering process, she says. Now Sharecare plans to collect users' answers from already established user-driven communities, such as a pregnancy forum, and then ask that community to vote on the best answers.

Sharecare will use the top answers on its site. Such screening is necessary, because when content is about health, ramifications can be very serious, says Whaley. She notes that the site's hospital partners prefer this curated version of health social media better than the "free for all" user content found elsewhere. Presumably, sponsors - from pharma, insurance, over-the-counter and packaged-goods companies - will feel the same way.

Users' response is less certain. Perhaps the draw of Dr. Oz, supported by his TV show, books, radio show and magazine columns will draw them in. Or not. The inability to post an answer directly on the Sharecare site could drive users right to the arms of Oz's online rivals.