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

As promised - live from San Francisco and the Health 2.0 conference.

Half an hour to go and the room is filling up. Looks like a number of VCs are here looking to find investment targets.  They have an interesting audience response system here (wireless dell handhelds). Nice idea to involve the audience and the price to pay for free wireless. Great tool for polls during the panels - let's see how that works out.

First question on the ballot is who will be the next President of the United States. I didn't know Lindsey Lohan was running. Maybe I should pay more attention to the presidential primaries. Anyway, turns out Hillary Clinton won and Lindsey Lohan got a respectable 11%.

Room is packed, intro video about the history of Health care by scribe media is really cool.

Matthew describes what "health 2.0" means. Definition of Web 2.0 from Tim O'Reilly 9/2005.

Holt's best guess: personalized search that finds the right answer for the "long tail", better presentation of integrated data, communities, putting people in charge of their own health) enablement. The key is really personalization when contrasted to conventional tools.

Continuum from user generated health care to users connected to providers to eventually impacting drug development (personalized drugs).

Allegedly 120 mio adult Americans use the web already for health search, 2/3 of the physicians, and the

Doesn't sound like google is going to buy webMD - in fact, they are very careful in regards to monetization. Yahoo, and of course Microsoft, are way more aggressive. Neupert announced that they now have nine customers for their own clinical software. [Must be interesting to be a Microsoft partner, rely on their middleware AND compete on applications. Sun doesn't do applications]

Dr. Brailer: "health care services users do not overlap with the web 2.0 / health 2.0 users". "tech is not the only solution"  ...."by the time web 2.0 users become health service users, we'll be at health 3.0 or so". 2007 and 2008 is the shake out o health verticals - some companies will be there for the long run, others will find out it's a marathon, not a sprint.

Really nice search presentation by healia.com (google type search specialized on health, includes medline) - announced new feature to search clinical trials. The key discussion, however, is the business model of specialized health search engines. Anyone can use google or yahoo every day, but is looking for health info only once in a while - for example after returning from a doctor consultation. There is no question that the specialized engines are helpful, but the business models need work. An audience question covers how web 2.0 content is included. Quality control is of course an issue, and some sites allow tagging and comments (ala wikipedia)