AOL Health Adds Content Partners

AOL Health screeshotExpanding its editorial scope, AOL Health has partnered with a trio of health sites to add elder care information, doctor listings and other health-related articles and video.

The site's new content partners include Caring.com, which provides guidance on caring for elderly parents; HealthCare.com, with listings of more than 1.3 million medical and dental professionals; and Health.com, the online presence of Time Warner's Health magazine, which will supply articles, quizzes, image galleries and videos.

Only the deal with Health.com includes an ad revenue-sharing component.

The moves comes several weeks after AOL Body--launched a year ago-- was reframed as AOL Health to reflect the retooling of the site to emphasize family health care. "We recently changed the voice and tone and focus of the site," said Tanya Mancini, senior editorial director at AOL Health. "We wanted to broaden our reach and be able to answer questions people were asking."

That means offering material not just on healthy living and fitness, but on topics like elder care, which many Baby Boomers are now facing when assuming care for aging parents. "People aren't just looking for information about themselves," said Mancini.

Competition in the online health category has heated up in the last year with the launch of RevolutionHealth.com by AOL co-founder and former CEO Steve Case. He rapidly built up the site's content through a series of acquisitions or partnerships with focused health properties such as CarePages.com, a social site for people dealing with illness or injury.

"We're definitely keen to keep pace with some of the other (health) sites," said Mancini, who added that more changes are in store for AOL Health over the next year. "We have some very ambitious plans for the site." She declined to offer further details, however.

The revamp of AOL Health is part of the Time Warner unit's broader effort to overhaul existing properties or launch new ones to create scores of niche content sites intended to attract targeted advertising. AOL Health is part of AOL Living, its women-oriented site that had 16 million unique visitors in June, according to comScore.

AOL Living also includes sections focused on food, home, parenting and style.

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