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WebMD (HLTH $ 6.58 )

1. [verwijderd] 10 februari 2002 07:56

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   WebMD Is Somewhat Stronger After Therapy (HLTH, Nasdaq laatste sale, Vrijdag 8 Februari $ 6.58) February 4, 2002 By MILT FREUDENHEIM In its glory days, WebMD (news/quote) attracted strategic partners like Microsoft (news/quote), the News Corporation (news/quote) and DuPont and bought dozens of electronic and online health care companies with highflying WebMD stock. Entranced by those deals and the company's well-publicized dream of hooking up all the players in health care, investors pushed the share price of Healtheon/WebMD, as it was then called, to $126.1875 in May 1999. The bubble popped in 2000, and by last September the shares fell as low as $3.22. "WebMD was the poster child for everything that went right and everything that went wrong in health care on the Internet," said David Francis, a health care technology analyst at Jeffries & Company. Now, after 15 months of turnaround therapy administered by Martin J. Wygod, the entrepreneur who took over from the company's founders, the stock has rebounded somewhat, closing at $7.74 on Friday. WebMD, which said it had its first break-even month in operating cash flow in December, expects to report its full-year 2001 financial results on March 12. For the first nine months of last year, it booked a loss from continuing operations of $6.49 billion, including $6.31 billion of depreciation and amortization and other one-time charges. Revenue was $530.2 million, up from $318.2 million in the period in 2000. Although some analysts are skeptical, the company, based in Elmwood Park, N.J., is forecasting it will report growth in operating income before the end of this year. Since October 2000, the Wygod team has closed unprofitable businesses and bought back more than 77 million WebMD shares in what David Risinger, an analyst at Merrill Lynch (news/quote), calls "a herculean restructuring." Mr. Wygod said, "You always find things you didn't anticipate, more often negative than positive." The effort has relieved some investors' worries that former strategic partners were poised to dump the shares they had acquired during the Internet boom. Helping to shrink the pool of shares, several WebMD officials also bought stock over the last few weeks. And in a strategic coup on Dec. 26, WebMd scooped up the main business of its nearest competitor, MedicaLogic/Medscape Inc. for a bargain price of $10 million. Medscape was a casualty of the Webwide failure of advertising revenue to support Internet companies, which also afflicted WebMD. The acquisition strengthened WebMd's hold on the market, however unprofitable. "Without question, WebMD is the leading health care consumer portal," Michael J. Barrett, a health care analyst at Forrester Research (news/quote), said. The company says 15 million consumers visit the site each month. Mr. Wygod said that as health plans shift more and more of the costs of care to patients, WebMD would offer to provide plan members and doctors with information about a patient's coverage and "the pros and cons of opting for a drug or medical service that is not covered." Potential customers would be "payers, physicians, pharmacy benefit managers, medical device companies, and the pharmaceutical manufacturers," he said. WebMD also became the leading electronic bill processor for physicians, when it bought Envoy from the Quintiles Transnational Corporation (news/quote), a pharmaceutical product and market research company based in Durham, N.C., in 2000. Envoy takes claims from doctors, on paper and by telephone, and converts them into electronic code acceptable to insurance companies. Envoy collects fees based on millions of transactions. But Michael Davis, a health care research director at the Gartner Inc. (news/quote) technology consulting firm, said Envoy was in danger of losing business to insurers, which may provide free electronic transmission of physicians' bills, as well as to computer giants like I.B.M. (news/quote) and Electronic Data Systems (news/quote) that would also like to provide more services to doctors. All the companies hope to grab new customers when electronic messaging in health care becomes standardized as mandated by a 1996 federal law. The original deadline for this to happen was last fall, but has been postponed until October. WebMD is scrambling to stake out its position early by offering new software for doctors' offices and hand-held personal digital devices for physicians that will provide instant access to a patient's medical record, health plan status and treatment suggestions. The company is testing the hand-held devices with 500 doctors and expects to add 1,500 more this year. But Mr. Davis said that may not be enough and fast enough to keep ahead of competitors. Envoy and Medical Manager, a company that also merged into WebMD, have links with 185,000 of the nation's 500,000 physicians. But selling to doctors is not easy. "Doctors are cheap and risk- averse like the rest of us, but at the far end of the spectrum," Mr. Francis of Jeffries said. "You have to prove that your product can put more money in the doctor's pocket." O
2. troetelbear 11 februari 2002 23:43

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   Wie volgt HLTH en kan iets zinnigs zeggen over de potentie van deze onderneming
3. [verwijderd] 17 februari 2002 21:24

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   Hi Uppelschoten, ken je: finance.yahoo.com/q?d=1y&s=hlth Tons of information, kijk onder "profile", "significant developments", etc. Groeten, O