Boise-based Healthwise, publisher of health-care handbooks and provider of content for medical websites, plans to add 14,000 square feet to its 7-year-old headquarters on Bogus Basin Road.

Healthwise has grown steadily since it moved to its 28,000 square-foot quarters north of Harrison Hollow Boulevard in 1997, said Chairman and CEO Don Kemper.  The organization hired about 10 people a year for the last few years, he said.

The nonprofit company employs 137 people, divided roughly by thirds into medical writers and editors; administration and support; and programmers, system analysts and operations personnel.

That's up from 96 employees in 2000 and 47 in 1995, said Communications Manager Brenda Foster.  Much of the growth came on the technical side as Healthwise's online clientele grew.

"We're getting tight," Kemper, 58, said.  The addition on the north side of the building will make room for more office space, a larger reference library, and an expanded employee fitness center, and will contain room for growth, he said.

Construction is to start in late summer or early fall, Kemper said, with completion in spring of 2006.  Healthwise hadn't chosen a contractor for the addition designed by erstad thornton architects, Boise.

Though Healthwise was founded by Kemper in 1975 to publish self-care handbooks, which it still updates every 18 to 20 months, its main role today is as "probably the primary source of consumer health information on the Internet," Kemper said.

The organization licenses its content, directly or indirectly, to WebMD, AOL, MSN, and the websites of AARP, numerous hospitals (including Saint Alphonsus Regional Medical Center and St. Luke's Regional Medical Center), and nine of the top 10 largest managed care organizations, including Aetna, Cigna Corp., UnitedHealth Group, and WellPoint Health Networks.

"Boise's becoming the consumer health information capital of the world," Kemper said.

Licensing fees and handbook sales have grown from $8.2 million in 1995 to $13.6 million in 2003 to $16.2 million last year, according to Foster.  The organization "really started growing in the '90's as managed care took odd," she said.

Healthwise expects an even greater boom in the use of its medical information to come as more health organizations adopt "information therapy."

In this practice, doctors, in addition to prescribing medication or treatments, write "information prescriptions" for their patients.

These would come in the form of written information about the patient's condition, which the patient could access in an individual online account linked to the organization's website.

Hospital or clinic staff would place the prescribed information in patient's accounts so they could access it.

"It's pretty typical that people, by the time they drive home, have forgotten most of what they learned from their doctor, and what they remember they remember wrong," Kemper said.

Massachusetts General Hospital, Palo Alto Medical Foundation and Group Health Cooperative, a managed care organization, are among entities that have begun using information prescriptions.

Kemper, who penned the book Information Therapy:  Prescribed Information as a Reimbursable Medical Service, expects the idea to eventually be adopted by most health care organizations.