BLOG on IT/IS in Healthcare & Life Sciences Joerg Schwarz on Healthcare [Health + Care]

Reflecting on Health 2.0 - What did and what did not happen, what was there and what was not there

My Mac ran out of power yesterday, so I had to stop live blogging half way through the conference. But that's maybe a good thing, because it provided some time to reflect on what happened and what didn't happen yesterday.

So first, we know what happened: the entire crowd was very pleased. Great panels and panelist, good organization, exciting topics. In the audience were many big companies (I was, for example, by sheer happenstance, on a table with Pfizer and United Healthcare and a Venture Capital representative), something we used to call "old economy" in the .com days, and on stage were the young start-ups, the ".com's". It felt like 97 or 98'ish - I was in Silicon Velley then, and boy, it felt much like it at Health 2.0 yesterday. For the good, and for the bad.

Health 2.0 is about using Web 2.0 technology to personalize health experience. From personalized health search on specific sites like healia.com, to social networking sites for patients, like patientslikeme.com, or care professionals, like sermo.com, or the linkedin for physicians, within3. I could go on and on describing these sites, but that's not the point.

Jay Silverstein from RevolutionHealth and Esther Dyson from EDventure made excellent remarks in the final feedback panel: the conference was great, lots of innovation and enthusiasm, but Health 2.0 is too fragmented, too complex right now. Too many sites to go to. People, Life is not one dimensional.

While google and yahoo are not as good for health searches as healia, they are good to find sites like healia, and people do not search for health related things all the time and exclusively. One might b e a patient at one time and use a site like patientslikeme, but why would that patient have to go to quickenhealth or HealthEquity to keep track of medication expenses, or go to ? Why does that patient already registered in a patient community need to go to Vimo or Careseek to find a doctor rating? Shouldn't all health plans do what BCBS of Minnesota does with Healthcare Facts, anyway?

Marty Tenenbaum had, like me, a deja vu feeling, and said he felt like the first e-commerce meeting before companies like Amazon and eBay figured out that they have to build an entire supply chain, not just offer a point solution and a good idea.

That brings us to the other side of the day and to what did not happen. google, for example, did not announce it would acquire WebMD (or anyone else of the startups present at Health 2.0). No, google will instead look carefully at the evolution of Health 2.0 said Missy Krasner. Maybe I was right, and google discovered that the true value comes from connecting personal health records to the legacy systems.

And that's what was not discussed - how data from existing and future EMR/EHR systems could be used to populate PHRs with quality data, instead of relying on data provided by patients. Besides quality concerns, who has time to update detailed health information all the time? But once one has a PHR, that PHR could become the central hub for managing finances, searching for good providers or joining social networking groups. But none of this joining, aggregating and connecting was discussed yesterday. Maybe I think too much in old economy, but it was a common sentiment in the audience.

Esther Dyson made another good point when she said that is was also not discussed how to keep someone from becoming a patient - the whole lifestyle, wellness and prevention story was absent from Health 2.0. Why? No good ideas?

There will be a next Health 2.0 conference, maybe soon, and those questions need to be addressed, or the people who were there in 1999 will have another deja vu in regards to Health 2.0, but this time one the reminds of 2002....