Steve Case, the founder of AOL, which is now owned by my parent company Time Warner (TWX) - you may have heard a thing or two about a little merger between AOL and Time Warner some years ago - formally launched his new online medical information company RevolutionHealth on Thursday.

During a Webcast presentation, Case made his uh, case, for why he thought consumers should use RevolutionHealth, a free Web site. He used many of the Web’s big buzzwords, such as “social networking” and touted features on the sites such as its KnowYourRisk assessment feature, a ratings service for doctors and hospitals and the company’s newly acquired CarePages.com, a site that lets people caring for somone who is ill set up private Web sites to communicate with friends and family members.

 ”We think it’s time for people to become more actively engaged in managing their health,” Case said.

I’ll admit that the site looks pretty comprehensive in terms of what it offers. But some of Case’s claims struck me as a little suspect. For one, when he talked about how RevolutionHealth would let people rate their doctors, he made it sound as if there are no other sites that already do this. “I think it’s crazy that people can get ratings on movies and restaurants but not on doctors,” he said.

However, if you just go to Google and type in the search term “doctors and ratings,” several sites crop up, including publicly traded HealthGrades (HGRD), RateMDs.com  and DoctorScorecard.

RevolutionHealth faces a lot of competition. According to figures from Web tracking firm comScore,  WebMD (WBMD), with 17.8 million unique visitors in March,  is the online leader in medical information. RevolutionHealth, which had been running a beta site since January, had only 486,000 unique visitors according to comScore.

Other medical sites with a much bigger presence - at least for now - than RevolutionHealth are Yahoo! Health (YHOO), EverydayHealth.com, which is owned by privately held Waterfront Media, a company Time Warner has invested in that has the rights to operate the Web site based on “The South Beach Diet” books, the New York Times’ (NYT) About.com Health site and ironically enough, AOL Health.

Case also said that RevolutionHealth is different from other health care sites because of “trusted content.” He pointed to partnerships with The Mayo Clinic and The Cleveland Clinic.

Those are obviously two good “gets” but it’s not as if the other major health care sites also don’t feature advice from professional physicians. Yahoo’s health site, for example, has several expert blogs written by doctors from Johns Hopkins University. So it’s not like the scores of other big health care sites out there are relying on the medical expertise of Dr. Nick Rivera, the resident quack on ”The Simpsons.”  

So will RevolutionHealth really alter the online medical landscape? I’m not so sure. At first blush, the only main differentiating factor that RevolutionHealth has is its “celebrity” board. In addition to Case, former HP CEO Carly Fiorina, Netscape founder Jim Barksdale, former Fannie Mae CEO Franklin Raines and Colin Powell sit on the company’s board.

I also found it telling that when Case was asked during the presentation, via questions sent by email, about how his experiences at AOL helped him create RevolutionHealth, he stressed patience. In other words, the new venture is not going to become an overnight success.

“One of the things we learned at AOL is that some of the big ideas take some time to get going,” he said.

I can already hear some of the cynical grumblings out there in the blogosphere. Isn’t it interesting that an employee at Time Warner is bashing Steve Case? Hmmm. 

Don’t get me wrong. As I pointed out already, the site is fairly comprehensive. Plus, Case clearly is very passionate about this new venture. I don’t doubt that for one second, especially since he sadly lost his older brother to brain cancer a few years ago. And of course, there’s nothing wrong with a free site that dispenses quality medical information. Heck, it’s probably better for society that he decided to start up RevolutionHealth as opposed to, say, yet another YouTube clone.

But it’s just flat-out incorrect to say that there aren’t other sites that don’t already do what RevolutionHealth is trying to do - create a one-stop shop for medical advice and expertise. RevolutionHealth may in fact be impressive. But despite Case’s claims, it’s hardly unique or revolutionary.