David Richards' sky is falling in. The steady rains have taken their toll on his Norfolk, Va., house; now he's struggling to repair a collapsed roof.

No matter. Richards tries his best to be a portrait of calm. "I'm relatively immune to stress," says Richards with a laugh. When he's not home holding up the ceiling, Richards is in Tarrytown, N.Y., heading Physicians' Online, the Net's largest doctor-centric community.

You might say that Richards is a master of managed health care. That is, managing his own. Certainly, Richards' purported immunity to stress has been repeatedly tested, as Physicians' Online has experienced a series of dizzying ups and downs since its inception in 1992 and launch two years later.

Just last week, the company began a major overhaul when it was acquired by Mediconsult.com, a leading patient-oriented site. With new Internet health-care companies threatening to eclipse Physicians' Online and Mediconsult, these two online old-timers saw the immediate need to join forces. The recent merger of flashy startups WebMD and Healtheon (HLTH) - the latter founded by Jim Clark, the Web wizard with a Midas touch - posed a threat. As did Medscape, now partnering with AOL (dossier). "A few years ago, we were the only game in town," says Richards, who in the early '90s foresaw a bright future in the medical industry.

No, Richards insists, getting involved with Physicians' Online wasn't his way to channel an unfulfilled dream to be an M.D. "I never had any aspirations to be a doctor," he asserts. Aside from a five-year, post-college stint playing on the professional golf circuit ("I got good enough so that I could lose money," he says), the 40-year-old Richards has always aspired to launch new-media ventures. To date, this is his third gig as a CEO.

Richards was one of the first entrepreneurs to see the enormous potential in bringing a trillion-dollar health-care industry online. In 1994, while at Landmark Communications (dossier), the media company that owns the Weather Channel, Richards persuaded the company to invest in the fledgling Physicians' Online. Since then, the site has flourished, but not without acute growing pains.

"There have been a lot of mistakes," says Richards, who has tested Physicians' Online with various technologies and business models, some that have worked and many that have flopped. For example, its bulletin board discussions among the 80,000 doctors who use the service have been a big hit, but the real-time online chats never took off. Richards' antidote to fixing problems within the company is to listen to employees. "You can't be an expert in everything," he says. "It's more about listening than figuring you know everything yourself. The right answers can come from within anywhere in the organization."

Colleagues attribute Physicians' Online's present-day successes to Richards' amiable bedside manner. "The unsuccessful CEOs I've seen will, if they see employees make mistakes, quickly chop off their heads," says Richards, who believes that such corrective surgery is more than dangerous. "You have to be open-minded. A controlling personality generally thinks they're always right, that they're smarter than anyone else. If you're a control person at an Internet company, it will die."

It's Richards' ability to be flexible, rather than rigid, that's seen Physicians' Online through tough times, says Todd Marin, managing director at J.P. Morgan and Richards' former graduate-school classmate. "David is able to say, 'Whoops, the world is changing. I'm going in another direction.' A lot of leaders aren't able to do that, aren't nimble enough to change their strategy."Richards is so open to change, in fact, that he welcomes the chance to get off the CEO circuit. "If the right opportunity came around, I wouldn't mind stepping back for a bit," says Richards. "There's a certain comfort in being the No. 2 guy. There are a lot of good things to be said about being CEO, but it is very stressful. Basically, you're everyone's lightning rod."

Even David Richards' steely nerves can break under the pressure of a Netco.