As a newly certified doctor in 1996, Inderjote (Bobby) Kathuria says he "got burned and embarrassed many, many times" by the chief resident at Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn, Ill. The chief resident’s job was to ask the new residents incredibly detailed medical questions about their patients. "As an intern you’re up all night," Kathuria recalls. "You might get slammed with 10 admissions, and you have to make sure they’re all stable. And yet on morning rounds you’re supposed to know all the answers."

Kathuria consulted medical journals and textbooks to withstand the 8 a.m. grillings. As a member of a prominent Indian family that owned several Internet businesses, the young doctor was well-acquainted with the Web even in 1996 and tried surfing to find relevant medical information.

"The only trouble was, information was so darned hard to find. Some of it made no sense or was so basic it really didn’t help you at all. And the good information was never in one place. You’d have to go to 12 different sites, then navigate links to a dozen more. Then [because the university’s system didn’t have a bookmarking capability], you could never remember how you got there in the first place."

Kathuria may now be correcting those problems that plagued him as a resident—and a bunch of others, besides. Kathuria, who went on to get an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago, is "soft launching" HealthCite.com sometime in August. Developed with three other doctors and a medical-industry technologist, the site will be replete with arguably the best medical information available anywhere.

In the process, HealthCite is pioneering a potentially important new type of market, sometimes called a "metamarket." Drawing on all the resources available on-line, the founders began with a clean sheet of paper and designed an entire market that is meant to handle everything a customer needs concerning health care. That begins with information but also includes the ability to find doctors, to purchase drugs, to chat with others who have similar medical conditions, to manage scheduled treatments—even to help users communicate with family and friends about sensitive conditions.

What makes this approach unusual is that Kathuria and his partners didn’t start by thinking about the products and services they wanted to sell—as drkoop.com and other on-line businesses typically do. Instead, the founders saw HealthCite primarily as the organizer that pulls together the products, services, and information already offered by others.

As they see it, even if they charge the tiniest of fees each time they help buyers and sellers find each other, there is a lot of money to be made by becoming "a single point of contact on the Web among consumers, physicians, retailers, vendors, medical-hardware makers, pharmacy companies, and suppliers" in a $1.3 trillion marketplace.

In the almost two years it has taken them to get to where they are today, HealthCite’s founders had to pose, and answer, a set of questions about their nascent business that turned out to be far more grueling than any interrogation by a chief resident.

The first seemed deceptively simple: Whom would the site serve? "We decided it had to be credible to physicians first," Kathuria says. But the team soon discovered it had to address the needs of patients, too. Brandon Chan, a doctor who is a co-founder and now the chief executive officer, says they had to figure out, "How do doctors and patients think? What are they looking for? Do they come for [information about] a symptom, or a diagnosis, or treatment?"

HealthCite conducted a long series of focus groups and found that patients and doctors were seeking different things. Physicians were most concerned about maintaining the confidentiality of patient records, while consumers wanted understandable information and help thinking about treatment choices.

Then there was the language barrier. While HealthCite was initially based on the technical vocabulary that doctors use, the founders learned just how little medical terms mean to patients, and just how many slang terms their site would have to recognize. What a doctor calls congestive heart failure is known as "dropsy" in the rural South. The numerous types of diabetes—juvenile diabetes, type I diabetes, adult-onset diabetes, hyperglycemia, type II diabetes, and so on—may be lumped together as "high sugar" by patients.

As the HealthCite founders learned about how physicians and patients think, they became ever more audacious. They decided they shouldn’t be just what the doctors ordered. They had to address the entire interaction between doctor and patient. To do that, they had to offer the most-trusted, independent, and comprehensive medical data and advice on-line.

Then one day, Kathuria accidentally discovered there was a new term and business model for what they were attempting. At a social function, Kathuria ran into an old family friend in the Chicago area’s Sikh community: Mohanbir Sawhney, who is a professor of digital commerce at Northwestern University’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management. Sawhney said HealthCite was actually attempting to be a "metamediary."

A what? Sawhney, who was recently ranked among Business Week magazine’s "e-Business 25" as a visionary, had been promoting the idea for more than a year in business journals, but Kathuria had never heard of Sawhney’s notion of a new kind of electronic middleman that adds value through convenience and trust.

Sawhney, who now is on HealthCite’s board, explained that a metamediary is a sort of digital answer-man, impresario, and circus master, all rolled into one. Such an entity creates an electronic smorgasbord of connected processes, services, products, and transactions around complex needs, such as buying a house, planning a family’s financial future, or (Eureka!) seeking medical advice. In Sawhney’s paraphrase of President Kennedy: "Ask not what products you make. Ask what you can do for your customers."

When Sawnhey later met with HealthCite’s founders in August 1999, he told them: "I’m out there preaching, and you guys are practicing my religion."

Even before HealthCite stumbled onto its business model, it had to decide how to finance development. The group, which included Bobby Kathuria’s brother, Chrinjeev Kathuria, another medical doctor, decided on self-financing, through their family. That isn’t an option open to many entrepreneurs, but the Kathurias own sporting goods, rice, henna, textile, and dye and chemical businesses. They were also involved in the development of wireless phones in Eastern Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and developing countries, as well as Internet service provider companies in Europe and Japan.

Self-financing allowed the group to avoid having to dilute equity substantially by raising money before they had a working demonstration—that was especially important in the HealthCite case because, while their concept can be hard to describe, it becomes obvious once someone sees it in action.

There were two downsides: Talent is proving harder to recruit without the backing of venture capitalists. And, the Kathurias’ mother, Satinder, yet another doctor who works for the U.S. Veterans Administration, didn’t want her children to go into business. "In the Indian community," Bobby Kathuria explains, "doctors get more respect than businesspeople. She said, ‘Why don’t you stick to medicine?'"

Kathuria assured his mother that he had a backup profession if the business didn’t work out. But he says, "With all this family pressure I certainly didn’t want to fail."

In fact, one of the first things the group did was to lose a huge contract with a large retail pharmaceutical chain that had agreed to sell drugs through HealthCite. Despite HealthCite’s efforts to cater to patients’ needs, the chain felt that the site still wasn’t consumer-friendly enough.

"It was one of many classic learning experiences," Kathuria says.

His team went back and redesigned the site, almost totally from a layman’s point of view. Indeed, a test drive of HealthCite’s resulting beta site reveals a very intuitive design. On the left side of the page is a simple alphabetical list of health topics, starting with acne, AIDS, and alcoholism. But a user can also ask a question in English, French, Italian, and (soon) Asian languages. As a demonstration, Kathuria types in, "What is a tick bite?" Up pops a page of topics, information, and related drug treatments.

Trying the various links, a user can see a magnified image of a female deer tick or a picture of a Lyme disease rash, at a medical illustration site. Detailed Lyme disease information is cited from periodicals, medical journals, government reports, and hospital sources, all of which have been vetted by HealthCite’s panel of 40 medical-professional reviewers. Links also are available to the National Library of Medicine’s "Medline" database, as well as to other government and private centers conducting research on the condition.

In addition, an e-commerce engine brings up relevant information on drugs and other products, linked to makers of medications or medical supplies. Users can even locate a nearby specialist based on ZIP Code.

The idea is to provide information that Kathuria calls "a mile wide and a mile deep." Already, HealthCite has amassed information on 35,000 terms covering 200 disease areas.

Phil Gross, senior vice president of strategic management processes, including e-business, at Warner-Lambert, likes what he sees at HealthCite.

"Its search engine is very easy to use and very effective," he says. "The hierarchy is another benefit. If you are interested in something, it isn’t very long before you want to go deep. The drkoop stuff, for example, is sort of second-grade level and never gets past that."

Of course, just declaring yourself to be at the center of a huge market doesn’t make it so. It’s hard to be all things to all people, even if only within one segment of the market.

To keep moving forward, HealthCite needs to expand the topics it covers while continually updating those it has already addressed and while dealing with the fact that the sheer volume of information on the Web is exploding. HealthCite has developed a "spider" that crawls the Web to find information, but managing it all effectively is still a hard problem.

HealthCite also needs to greatly expand its array of strategic partnerships, to extend its reach and give it credibility with users. HealthCite scored a coup when it recently lined up an investment from Amgen, the big biopharmaceutical company. Kathuria says he will soon announce a series of other important relationships. He has also signed term sheets with a medical school to use the site as a teaching tool, increasing HealthCite’s credibility with doctors.

It didn’t do HealthCite any good when drkoop, the best-known site for medical information, saw its stock crater in the spring, but Kathuria says he has convinced potential partners that drkoop made fundamental errors that HealthCite is avoiding. His diagnosis: When drkoop decided to do its own write-ups of available medical information it took on a hopeless task. It also relied too much on advertising for revenue.

Dan Jacobson, HealthCite’s chief technology officer, says some powerful potential allies have a vested interest in seeing a site like HealthCite flourish. He says pharmaceutical companies lose $30 billion a year in revenue simply because people don’t fill all their prescriptions.

If HealthCite reminds people to, for instance, take all their antibiotics rather than stop once the symptoms disappear, that could be a huge boon to drug companies. (Jacobson notes that patients would benefit, too.)

Assuming that HealthCite can keep building momentum, the founders have a whole array of ideas for services that drkoop, WebMD, and other medical sites on-line don’t yet offer. For instance, HealthCite may create a co-op to negotiate discounts on supplies and rebates on services for consumers. "We also have the ability to find the lowest cost for procedures," Kathuria says. An individual might even, he suggested half-jokingly, bid out a nose job among plastic surgeons. He says HealthCite could also let patients rate doctors and hospitals.

Working with an organization known as World Care, HealthCite participants will be able to receive second opinions from best-of-class specialists, Kathuria said. The doctor says that capability could save lives, because statistics show that in 50% of initial diagnoses the wrong therapies are suggested.

There seems to be just one medical goal that remains beyond the reach of this ambitious metamediary in the making: "New doctors still won’t get enough sleep unless the whole concept of residency changes," Kathuria says with a laugh. "But I hope they’ll be able to manage the little time they do have more efficiently."

Wolinsky is a technology reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times. He can be reached at wolinsky@ameritech.net.