MedHelp
MedHelp is an American private corporation that was founded in February 1994 and pioneered the field of consumer health information and communities on the Internet, before WebMD, Microsoft or Yahoo!. Overview MedHelp partners with doctors from hospitals and medical research institutions to deliver online discussion boards on healthcare topics. The company's slogan is "Finding Cures Together." In December 2008, MedHelp was ranked 3,090 in the Alexa Internet 3 month traffic rankings of all sites on the web and gets over 7 million unique visitors each month. History The founders of MedHelp, Cindy Thompson and Phil Garfinkel, met in December 1993, while conducting research in CompuServe's Med-Sig Forum. Both had family members that had struggled with life-threatening illnesses. They discussed the difficulties they encountered in obtaining medical information in lay terminology. Cindy mentioned that one of her dreams was to create a service where patients would be able to contact leading physicians and scientists, who could answer specific questions, in lay terminology, regarding their diagnoses. Based on that vision, they incorporated the company on February 14, 1994 and launched the MedHelp bulletin board system (BBS) on April 1, 1994 with a 386 computer, two modems, and two phone lines. In 1995,