On Thursday September 20 the first Health 2.0 was held in San Francisco. The agenda of the conference was very interesting. Below I will present an overview of the topics presented during the conference. But the first question to be answered is: what is Health 2.0?

Wat is Health 2.0?
Is Health 2.0 a buzzword just as Web 2.0? Health 2.0 features in a lot of articles but what is Health 2.0? Scott Shreeve tries to define Health 2.0.

Health 2.0 Definition: “New concept of healthcare wherein all the constituents (patients, physicians, providers, and payers) focus on healthcare value (outcomes/price) and use competition at the medical condition level over the full cycle of care as the catalyst for improving the safety, efficiency, quality of health care delivery.”

Amazingly perhaps the definition is not confined to the internet.

A movement that transcends the web2.0 technologies and poses the opportunity to revolutionize the way healthcare services are conceived and provided.

The conference
Youtube features an introduction to the conference.

The conference starts with a film made by Scribemedia.org. The film addresses the question ‘what is health 2.0?’

During the first presentation Mathew Holt of The Health Care Blog explains his definition and ideas about Health 2.0. Searching for health information is an essential part of Health 2.0. This is even more important for Health 2.0 than Web 2.0, since health care and health information is extremely complex. Health 2.0 is also about integration of the search results, and about intelligent tools of content delivery. And Health 2.0 might result in patients being in charge of their health care. Consumentism and technology play an important role. The first four minutes of the presentation can be seen in the video below.

De eerste 4 minuten van zijn presentatie zijn in de onderstaande video te zien. The Health Care Blog features an extented report of this presentation.

A great number of companies and initiatives presented their projects and ideas at the conference in San Francisco. The first part of the conference was about aggregating medical information. Big names such as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, WebMD and Think-Health participated in the panel. The most important aspect of aggregation is gaining the publics trust.

The goal is to first create a highly trusted brand. That’s the predicate to be able to leverage in health care the assets that each of these major firms have accumulated elsewhere.

Google answer to the question of its Health 2.0 business models was interesting.

… Google does not aspire to be a health care company, but rather extend their reach as a firm that helps people manage information. They use very small project groups. Their goal is always to drive more search, since that’s where they make their money.

The lack of Health 2.0 business models was picked by the press, iHealthbeat shows.

“A lot of these services have just really begun in the past year,” John Grohol, founder of PsychCentral.com said, adding, “It’s not clear that they will be successful.”

At the question whether the doctor is marginalized the panel answered that Health 2.0 serves patients as well as doctors. See for yourself how Google thinks about health information seeking users. ICYOu.com also features a comment from WebMD. For an extended report of this part take a look at The Healthcare Blog.

The second part of the conference dealt with searching for medical information. Representatives of Healia, Kosmix, Medstory, Healthline en WeGoHealth demonstrated their search engine. They used the search diabetes to show the functionality of their search engine. The result for the different engines are: Medstory, Healia, Kosmix, Healthline, WeGoHealth. The differences between the results are remarkable. Bob Coffield from Healthcare Blog Law aggrees.

Each of the panel members did a quick demo of their individual search product focused on diabetes information. Interesting to see the various search engines search results for the same topic. I was overwhelmed by the information and can’t imagine an ordinary consumer of health care (especially one who is poor, uneducated and otherwise unsophisticated) being able to grasp this much information.

Read the extended report at The Health Care Blog.

The next part was about social media for patients. Again a lot of big names were invited. Patients Like Me, a community website for sharing experiences, looking up treatments. Daily Strength is another platform for sharing patient experience with over 100.000 registered users. OrganizedWisdom uses people to optimize their search engine. This should result in a spamfree engine. Sophia’s Garden is a virtual community for parents and their ill children. According to Martijn Hulst it is a kind of Second Live.

Sophia’s Garden lijkt een soort Second Life te worden, waarin artsen en patienten elkaar in een driedimensionale virtuele omgeving kunnen ontmoeten.

MedHelp International features a lot of health information collected by experts. Also People’s Choice Award winning Inspire attended this meeting. Inspire is also a community-website. The similarity between these websites is the use of technology to create a better experience, according to The Healthcare Blog.

The interesting characteristic of these sites is that technology is used to facilitate a better experience for patients. The tools are aimed at people who may or may not be experienced in using tools.

This session resulted in a recommendation for the physicians and pharmaceutical industry.

In a session on social networking for health care, one of the conclusions was that physicians and pharma should monitor these sites as a way of understanding the patient experience including how they react to treatments.

Again you can read a report at The Healthcare Blog. In the video below an interview with Organized Wisdom.

Next topic dealt with the payers, provides and pharma. Kaiser Permanente, Regence Blue Cross Blue Shield of Oregon, Ziegler HealthVest Fund, Digitas Health, and Pacific Business Group on Health attended the meeting. Read the report at The Healthcare Blog.

Next in line were tools for consumers. Inuit is a tool to calculate the costs of health care for an individual patient. It translates difficult terminology to simple language, so a consumers knows what he pays for. Using this tool he never pays to much. Enhanced Medical Decisions support the consumers’ medicine use. Interactions between drugs and side-effects are easily available. HealthEquity offers Health Saving Accounts, so consumers can save money on their health care expenditures. RevolutionHealth offers a number of tools. You can calculate your risk for several diseases, look up what a certain symptom is, search for health care in the neighborhood and rate this care, tell your story, share information with friends and family and create an online dossier. DNADirect offers online clinical tests, free online advice and the possibility to make an appointment online.

After the consumers’ tools the subject changed to social media for physicians among other things. Sermo is a social network for physicians. It is for physicians only, but it is not hard to enter as a non-physician.

Money is not a motivator of physicians. They have found that the physicians on Sermo are motivated more by the need to collaborate.

Within3 is another social network for physicians, researcher and health care groups. They can use the website to improve and strengthen their relation. People for 61 countries and 6 continents are registered at this moment. A consumer can use Vimo to search for insurances, health saving accounts, physicians and dentist. Careseek offers a physician rating tool for consumers. Careseek also created Nursesratedoctors.com. Nurses can rate physicians.Medical Alliances is a consultancy firm specialized at innovation and collaboration. Questions arose about anonymous rating. This is a hot topic. The audience also wanted to know how the companies protect their business models. Sermo, f.i., only provides anonymous aggregated data for trendanalysis. Other questions from the audience:

• How do the companies moderate the comments made by consumers about providers and what are the legal ramifications?
• What are the panel members doing to protect/address protecting privacy within their business model? Will they make the data anonymous before reporting that out to other groups? Sermo will be making the aggregated data available to track trends and be analyzed by others.
• What is your business model? Most rely on value of the data aggregated and advertising. Daniel at Sermo indicated that Sermo does not rely on advertising but instead talked about value in information arbitrage (taking advantage of the information created through the system).

The conference ended with a view of the future. Interesting quotes:

EMRs [electronic medical records] are being used as a substitute for the paper charts. But, as with home accounting software, they become transformative when connectivity is added.

Health search is much more valuable when there is more patient data. The majors are positioned to create a new health data ecosystem comprised of interconnected health records surrounded by transparency and decision support tools.

More quotes can be found on The Healthcare Blog and Healthcare Blog Law.

I used the sources The Healthcare Blog and HealthcareBlogLaw extensively.Other interesting links about the conference and Health 2.0
First of all a lot of videos can be found at ICYou. The Healthcare Blog features an article with links the articles about the conference. Medgadget.com writes about the pain agenda of ReliefInsite.com. TrustedMD.com summarizes the event. Pionering ideas gives a summary. E-caremanagment is critical whether the data entrance is user friendly. Health 2.0 rock-n-rolls, according to HealthcareITblog. According to Psychcentral.com Health 2.0 is:

I think that’s it in practice, but more generally, it’s helping people leverage newer technologies to find other people and information related to a specific disease, condition, health or mental health concern.

Healthpopuli features a list with interesting quotes. Diabetesmine offers an interesting list with new Health 2.0 companies. I will describe the companies not yet mentioned above. Xoova is an online marketplace for medical services. Patients can search for information about complaints and symptoms at MEDgle.com. Curbside.MD offers a search with natural language. Healthcare.com is another health search engine. You can calculate your real age at Realage.com. Peerclip.com is a social bookmarking voor artsen. Doublecheck.com offers information about interactions between drugs. Bodymaps.org shows human anatomy on a Google Earth way. At iMedix patients can exchange information. Chatten might be possible in the future. Do you want more information on Health 2.0? Try Google Blogsearch or MedBlogEN search.

What about the Netherlands?

The second conference Van Patient tot Zorgconsument (from patient to health consumer) will be held at 19 november. I will give a presentation about Google: friend or enemy?

And Martijn Hulst hopes to organize the Dutch Health 2.0. So if you are interested consult me at jan @ medblog.nl or martijnhulst @ gmail.com.

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Dit artikel werd aangemaakt op maandag 1 oktober 2007 om 12:58 en werd geplaatst in Health 2.0, Sociaal netwerk, Video, english. U kunt de reacties van dit artikel volgen via de RSS 2.0 feed. Je kan een reactie plaatsen, of een trackback doen van je eigen site.

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