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

What would a new frontiers conference like Health 2.0 be without some brand new launches a the show?

Here are two of them:

Enhanced Medical Decisions launched DoublecheckMD The idea is brilliant: patients type in the data about their prescriptions and the site comes back with information about reported drug interactions. The idea is that the MD doesn't know all potential interactions while making the prescription.

However, wouldn't it be nice if there was a personal health record that already did this kind of check while the doctor makes the prescription? Old economy, brick-and-mortar guys like me would call this CPOE, and Dr. Greenes at HBW gave many talks about CPOE systems that do this (checking interactions and reported allergies) when the doctor makes the order entry to avoid, prevent risky prescriptions. Greenes reports that it's hard to do in the controlled environment of a Hospital. One can only speculate that DoublecheckMD might be better off since patients care about themselfs, but also question where the data will come from, how patients find it and what they will do with the info.

Another new startup was peerclip.com, a social networking site like sermo.com. I enjoyed Sermo's free water, coffee mug and after show party, so I'm maybe biased towards them, but fact is that there was little info about peerclip at the conference. Fact is there is at least two of everything, so why not two social networking sites exclusive to Physicians?

Anyway - my final remark on Health 2.0 - somehow I have to think about that sock puppet from pets.com all the time. Why? Don't know. Maybe because they put so much money into advertising so everyone knew the sock puppet, but somehow there was not enough margin in shipping a 40 lbs bag of dog food across the country (free shipping, of course) for 10 bucks (undercutting the Petco around the corner) to feed that sock puppet past the dog com....ehm dot com bust. I had to think about that sock puppet. No offense to peerclip, or healia or doublecheckMD, but I wonder where the dog food will come from this time around, if you know what I mean.