In the New Yorker this week, there is a review of Chris Anderson’s new book, “Free: The Future of a Radical Price”.  Anderson who is known for saying "information wants to be free" continues that theme in seeing all content, music, writing, etc. will be driven by economic forces to be free. He is reinforcing the death of newspapers and their need to find a new business model even if there is none to be had. His argument that the reduction in the cost of transistors and other technology allow for a great business opportunity to offer things for free.

While much of the Internet is free, especially content served up from newspapers to health care organizations, his proposal implying that all content should be free, devalues writers, whether medical writers, news reporters and editors and others. Granted the nature of intellectual property has changed in the Web 2.0 world but not so much as to obliterate the value of good writing and ideas. There is room today and in the future for this IP to be valued and paid for. While micropayments never took off on the web, let's hope that some newspapers survive and find additional business models to stay alive.

Technorati: Web 2.0

      

A post by Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle from the Web 2.0 Summit predicts extension of many of the existing tools to a more pervasive and organized internet and social media. "Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On" describes the future of:

• search using speech recognition
• data subsystems
•  making structured data out of unstructured data
• Sensor-based applications, such as, voice recognition on mobile devices
• Photosynth, Gigapixel Photography, and Infinite Images ( synthesize 3D images from crowdsourced photographs)
• The Rise of Real Time: A Collective Mind - we are moving toward having everything in real time, not just music, videos and books
• sensor-driven purchasing

However, change is moving so quickly, how many of these predictions will be reality in the next six months. Perhaps what will take 5 years is the integration of the platform, the apps and devices to become pervasive.

And how will all this filter into healthcare. iPhone apps for health care are just beginning to develop. I'm sure that more are on the way. What we need is a follow up article on the vision for Health 2.0 five years on.

Technorati: Web 2.0

      

Peter Neupert of Microsoft writes an article for the the Washington Post titled "Diagnosing and Treating the Health Non-System. "
He discusses three "diseases":

-Access (too many uninsured people)
-Value (too much spending for the health results delivered)
-Ignorance (at every level - who really pays for health, misaligned incentives, true costs, quality measures, transparency and more)

He focuses on value and notes that innovation is not occurring in health care "because of the inflexibility in the payment system and misaligned incentive."  Particularly, innovation regarding the management of chronic disease which accounts for 70%  of medical cost.

There will certainly be alot of discussion on realigning incentives to pay for outcomes rather than volume in the upcoming healthcare reform debates. It is long overdue.

      

There has been alot of debate about what Web 3.0 is and when it will arrive. In a post on ReadWriteWeb titled,  Web 3.0 or Not, There is Something Different About 2009, the debate continues. Also see the embedded slideshare. Some important trends in 2009 are:

• Open data
• Structured data -> smarter
• Filtering content
• Real-time
• Personalization
• Mobile (location-based, so you could say that's smarter use of data too)
• Internet of Things (the Web in real-world objects).

Linked data and Google snipets are noted as part of the trend. It sounds like mashups, web services and physical world integration are leading to a defacto Web 2.0 world. The implications for Health 2.0 will be the topic of a future post.

Technorati: Web 3.0

      

Participated in the Within3.com advisory board this evening - a very dynamic meeting with lots of creating ideas from the board and the staff. Their business model is refreshing - no advertising, no annonymous identities, developing communities which enhance healthcare and the practice of medicine. They just launched the community for the alumni of Boston's Childrens Hospital. Within3.com is a Cleveland startup (yes, Cleveland does have startups including many biotech firms). This is a company to watch.

Also, videos from the Health 2.0 conference in Boston have ben posted.

Technorati: Health 2.0

      

In a recent TED video, Tim Berners Lee presented on linked data including in health care and social networks. Te WC3 document he authored on this is here. This is foward thinking and although he did not mention Web 3.0, the implication is that this is the next big thing. Other links about linked data:

• How to Publish Linked Data on the Web
• linkeddata.org/

In a related story, IBM recently released its Exploratory Stream Processing Systems which "enables efficient extraction of knowledge and information from potentially enormous volumes and varieties of continuous data streams."

Here is the linked data video:

      

Two recent postings shining more light on Health 2.0. Specifically, a European post on Health 2.0 and Information Therapy, the joint topics for the Boston conference. He notes that both are an "enhance the patient care and the patient provider relationship."  He wonders about the business case for using something like Mayo Clinc's Health Manager based on HealthVault.  Currently, there is no indication that there are any such plans but some of the other examples, such as, LiveStrong and ChangeHealthcare, may have a business case for healthcare organizaitons.
Second is a video of Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody which I am currently reading. I also heard hims speak at HIMSS 2009. The video on Ask Manny Hernedez's blog gives an update on the book. The complexities of networks and the tools which enble groups to form without hierachies has interesting implications for healthcare. Healthcare, especially hospitals and nursing with their sometimes rigid structure inherited from the military and academia, is often the antithesis of social media. How will these tools change healthcare? Will healthcare hierachies disappear? Probably not soon, but these structures will be challenged by social media in the short term.

Technorati: Health 2.0

      

From a recent presentation in Baltimore.

Technorati: Health 2.0

      

Several articles and blog posts after the Health 2.0 conference and Healthcamp immediately prior in Boston reflect the incubator of innovation which is this space.

• Jane Sarasohn-Kahn on The Health Care Blog with the long title, "The public's belief in scientific uncertainty and the importance of the social health Internet" decribing a "health knowledge-dialectic" between providers and consumers
• Stanley Feld on "Healthcare Is A Team Sport" which is complimentary of Jen McCabe Gorman's understanding of social networking and content and his belief "that repair of the healthcare system can be partially achieved with effective disease specific social networks as an extension of physicians’ care."
• This Twitter Thing from Info.Matics about the experience of twittering at a conference as a confirmatory experience.
• Finally, the response of Google to ePatientDave's experience with Google Health.

With the related activity on Twitter continuing, more thoughts on the role of Health 2.0 in health care reform will emerge.

Technorati: Health 2.0

      

Mayo Clinic has announced its new Personal Health Record called Health Manager. Besides a feature rich tool including managing personal health information, monitoring health using a dashboard feature and getting health advice (integration with their health content), there are some significant aspects of this announcement:

• partnership with Microsoft HealthVault - right behind New York Presbyterian. The first two large medical centers to announce their Microsoft partnership
• this occurred right  after the announcement of stricter HIPAA rules under the HITECH federal regulations
• It is offered to the general public and not just patients of Mayo Clinic. MyNYP approaches this in the same way. It focuses it health information on heart health with an intro by Mehmet Oz of the You books fame.

The strategy appears to be to offer a service and potential attract new patients. The extent of the integration strategy with Microsoft HealthVault is unclear - can one create an account at one of these sites but then login directly through HealthVault? These two new sites will be interesting to watch.

Technorati: PHR