Web Companies Warming to Health Care

The term "disintermediation" -- the removal of the middleman -- hardly ever comes up anymore when people talk about the Internet.

That's because in industry after industry -- finance, retail, manufacturing -- millions of intermediate entities have fallen by the wayside, thanks to new software and connected computers.

Except for one, painfully opaque industry: health care. Web sites in the field, including government-run ones like the National Institutes for Health, or public companies like WebMD , are pretty good at gathering information about health and disease.

But the health care system itself remains the mother of all inefficient markets.

It's a mess even for the insured: overbooked doctors, rising premiums and co-pays and fewer choices. It's gotten to the point at which, with apologies to President Reagan, the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: "I'm in health care, and I'm here to help."

Under the radar, however, there are a handful of tech companies devoted to adding a little more transparency -- and possibly efficiency -- to health care.

None of them are likely to do for health care what Amazon.com did for retailing, but they promise to make inroads into the heart of darkness known as American medical care that could begin to make the industry work as it should.