WebMD has no more of a relationship with patients than does Google itself… My patients would just as soon visit WebMD today and healthstuff.blah tomorrow.

In contrast, there are initiatives that seem to be getting traction under the radar – one of my patients directed me to one of them, iGuard.org , yesterday. Its about time someone did something really creative.

Anyways, the only question is whether Emdeon is interested in selling WebMD, since it’s not its own entity. Emdeon is a publicly traded company, and I don’t see any particular reason they’d want to sell WebMD, as WebMD is profitable. It’s got a considerable amount of mindshare, and I don’t see them giving up such a household brand so easily. They may want more than Google is willing to pay.

Google has only been interested in buying or creating content-driven services when they’ve had difficulty indexing that specific kind of data in a meaningful way (YouTube), or if it’s private data (Gmail). Video content is difficult to make searchable, which is why the YouTube purchase made sense. There are no walls at WebMD, Google can spider it with no problems, ergo they have no reason to buy it.

I would see Google buying a site like geni.com before they’d make an offer for WebMD. I’d also see Google becoming the one and only advertising partner for WebMD rather than outright buying the property. That would make more financial sense, from this armchair expert’s point of view.

Of course, Google and WebMD both have at least one thing in common, both use extremely sophisticated tracking data about their users to target ads and to evaluate users for marketing purposes. If Google does buy WebMD, the privacy implications would be significant.

Plus, Google’s Manhattan offices are in the same building as WebMD’s…