While many big drugmakers hunt for biotechs or specific drugs to fatten their bottom lines, Johnson & Johnson is diversifying in a different direction - preventive healthcare.

The healthcare giant is buying HealthMedia, which provides online health-coaching sessions for such things as stress management, weight loss and diabetes management. And its software helps employers reduce their health care costs. Customers include Kaiser Permanente, UPS and the Cleveland Clinic.

The new business division will be overseen by Nicholas Valeriani, head of J&J’s Office of Strategy and Growth, which is developing and implementing the initiative. “We could now create a suite of products and services that are further upstream,” Valeriani tells The Wall Street Journal. “We could actually be part of the solution to slow down or bend the trend of these escalating health-care costs we see around the world.”

J&J has been a client of HealthMedia for several years and about 8,000 of its own employees have used the company’s services, the paper notes. However, getting patients to engage in preventive health care is a big challenge, and a substantial decrease in J&J’s traditional customer base of patients using its disease-diagnosis and treatment products to those using healthcare services won’t happen in “any reasonable time frame,” Valeriani tells the Journal (see J&J statement).

Ted Dacko, HealthMedia’s CEO and president, said his company, which had $23 million in revenue last year, hopes to eventually grow sales to $500 million. In the last few years, he has received one or two telephone calls each week from people interested in buying HealthMedia. “It’s a growth opportunity,” Dacko tells The Detroit Free-Press. “We will be adding jobs.”