This Patient Education site is available in order to answer common questions and to help you make an educated and careful decision about your treatment. If you have any questions about your medical condition or the surgical procedure presented on this site - the person to ask is your doctor.

MedSelfEd's business model takes maximum advantage of the convergence of several of the most important and compelling trends in the health care industry today. The founders recognized the power of these trends and designed MedSelfEd products (both existing and in development) to address them efficiently and cost effectively. These trends include:
v Rising costs of health care coincident with a perceived decrease in consumer satisfaction
v High priority of consumers, providers and payers (public and private) to control care costs
v Patients increasingly perceive that managed care cost-control imperatives have forced physicians to spend less time explaining and discussing their medical condition
v Consumers addressing care quality issues in part by increasingly participating more actively in medical decisions
v Emergence of health related information as the single most frequent use of the Internet as consumer seek facts to inform their decisions. Recent studies show that 70% of online consumers access the Internet for health information.6
v Health care professionals warning patients about the uneven quality of health care information (and even misinformation) on the Internet
v Competition for patients among providers in a marketplace where price is highly subordinated to perceived quality of care
v Providers losing increasing amounts of productivity because they must address patient concerns raised by inappropriate Internet materials they bring to the doctor
v Increasing numbers of payers and providers directing patients to their own or affiliated sites and seeking meaningful, understandable and medically reliable content they can brand to promote an image of service quality
v Increasing pressure on hospitals from accrediting bodies like the JCAHO to educate patients about their treatment or procedure, and to document that education effort
v Increasing numbers of non-English-speaking and second language patients to educate
v Increasing numbers of surgical and other invasive procedures performed
v Growing anxiety of physicians surrounding malpractice claims and soaring insurance rates
These trends will continue to drive demand for high quality, reliable, accurate and appropriately presented patient materials among all health care constituencies for the foreseeable future.


Medical professionals increasingly perceive patient education as an essential solution to the dual problems of declining health care quality and increasing costs. Since 1991, when the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Hospitals and Association (JCAHO) mandated a patient education standard, hospitals have developed web-based programs that require content. Medical studies have shown that formal educational materials can communicate important medical information to inform patient decisions, help set realistic expectations about outcomes and even reduce patient demand for invasive and expensive procedures. Taken together with the widespread trend among patients to assume more responsibility for their medical decision-making, these factors all create strong demand for high-quality, patient education materials. That 60% of web users seek health information online clearly indicates that the future of patient education will be web-enabled. A recent Wall Street Journal article cites good patient education delivered via web sites as a source of savings in unnecessary emergency room and doctor's office visits.1
The overall market potential for MedSelfEd's products runs to billions of dollars. The initial products could save substantial physician time, reduce patient anxiety, improve perceived quality and reduce the demand for invasive and expensive procedures at approximately 7500 hospitals, and many thousands of clinics and group practices. MedSelfEd's products could also serve the 220 million covered lives in health plans across the country at a per-member- per-month (pm/pm) rate. These markets are large, growing, cost-conscious and rational. less