WASHINGTON — Two paint cans sit by a doorway. Instead of nameplates, a few people have scrawled their names on pieces of paper and taped them to their doors.

If it looks as if it's move-in day even though some of the employees have been there nearly a year, it's because the digs on the eighth floor of 1250 Connecticut Ave. NW belong to a startup: Revolution Health, a consumer-oriented healthcare-services company that America Online founder and Punahou alumnus Steve Case launched in 2005.

The renovation of what was formerly a law office — one of two floors Revolution Health occupies — was put off last month while the company rolled out its first public preview of its marquee healthcare Web portal. The portal, which is scheduled to officially launch in April, aims to rival health information site WebMD. Revolution Health also offers a AAA-style service to help members with insurance billing problems and other issues, and it plans to expand a chain of health clinics in retail outlets.

It's tried to accomplish all this with a remarkably fast ramp-up. In one year, Revolution Health has gone from 60 employees to nearly 300. At one point, while waiting for more space to open up, it swapped larger desks for smaller ones to fit more people.

Case has so far invested $100 million in Revolution Health, part of the $500 million he said he plans to put into an eclectic array of businesses. The other ventures include a car-sharing service, a luxury resort in Arizona and a distributor of yoga videos. Of all these ventures, however, Revolution Health has the loftiest mission — to make healthcare more consumer-friendly. It's also the business Case most often compares to AOL, which he describes as a "20-year journey."

Ambitious banter ("building a company that can change the world," Case says) injects the place with a nonprofit vibe, which attracted the likes of Brad Jacobs, a physician and former researcher at the University of California at San Francisco who is Revolution Health's senior medical director.

"I can be much more true to consumers' needs here than in an academic hospital setting," Jacobs said.

Michael Carignan, a designer, was persuaded to leave his job at a consulting firm after hearing that Case was inspired by his experiences with the healthcare system during his brother's battle with brain cancer. The fact that the company was also backed by former Fortune 500 chief executives such as Franklin Raines and Carly Fiorina further assured Carignan, who briefly ran his own start-up, that it wasn't a fly-by-night operation.

"The expectation isn't 'we will go to the promised land' but 'they won't drive us off a cliff,' " Carignan said.

At Revolution Health, being backed by big bucks and bold-faced names translates into some very non-start-up perks such as a 401(k) plan and health insurance, although the company has chosen to provide coverage through health savings accounts.

"It's all centered around practicing what we preach when it comes to consumer choice and control," said Brad Burns, a company spokesman.

Several employees who came from older companies said they preferred the fluid environment of a startup where priorities are shifted daily, adjustments are constant and any missteps are chalked up to being part of the creative process. Some people saw fluidity as chaos and left. Others didn't fit and were asked to leave. A total of 50 people have come and gone in the past year.

"We're constantly prioritizing and evolving. You can never have exactly what you want by a certain date. You make it better all the time," said Mary Hope Garcia, who oversees content for several conditions.

Despite some first-day gaffes — the site was overwhelmed by traffic, freezing out users — the office atmosphere was relatively calm, employees said. By then, the portal had been redesigned several times, veering from traditional-looking to radically streamlined and back toward something in the middle.

There were still a few surprises. The site launched with in-depth surveys to determine risk of having a heart attack or a stroke, as well as lighter online tools, such as a calculator for what it would take to burn one pound.

America voted: It prefers figuring out how to burn a pound.