Health education websites such as WebMD have been around for some time now, but recently launched startup ChickRx has a slightly different take on the online medical information space. ChickRx is a health website and community for twenty-something women.
Founded by two recent Harvard MBA graduates, ChickRx provides relevant, fresh personal health information to young women. It’s sort of like a DailyCandy-meets-WebMD for health news. The site features expert Q&A, news, product picks and celebrity tidbits across the following categories: Sex & Gynecology, Fitness & Nutrition, Emotional Health & Relationships, Dermatology, and General Health.
Much of the content on the site falls into the preventative medicine category, with tips and info about bone density, breast cancer, and more. And ChickRx, unsurprisingly, has a large amount of content focused around weight-loss and sex.
Co-founders Stacey Borden and Meghan Muntean, who are both in their twenties, felt there was a need for a health website specifically targeting their demographic. The site takes a more “Tongue-in-cheek,” approach to serious health issues, attempting to make topics like ‘how to detect if a mole could be skin cancer’ informative and entertaining. Another example is internist Dr. Andrea Ruman’s description of the telltale symptoms and treatments for irritable bowel syndrome in an “Ask Rxperts” Q&A piece titled “IBS: It Beats Syphilis.”
ChickRx, which has raised $400,000 in seed funding counts Chris Schroeder, Trip Adler, Tikhon Bernstam and Susan Kare as advisors. Of course the startup still faces competition from WebMD, Medpedia and more general health info sites. But ChickRx could find a following, especially if the startup could partner with magazines (think Glamour, Marie Claire) to provide branded health content.