iVillage has taken another step in its plan to offer full-service health care information (and solutions?) to women with the acquisition of HealthCentersOnline, Inc., a privately-held, leading online destination for physician-edited information on health conditions, treatments and preventative care for patients that offers a series of topic- driven sites (think heart, allergies, etc.)
For $12 million bucks, iVillage now has a rich network of medical/wellness and health content that it can build out into packaged apps (think rich media and streaming), as well as a set of sites to operate as a network (think About.com).
As the population ages, instructional video moves online, and platforms diversify, iVillage will be well-poised to grow its brand as a health information player, which in turn could support new products. (On the other hand, the company is notoriously slow to move sometimes, so this might just be a nice advertising and aggregation play–for a while.)