Posts Tagged ‘Health 2.0’
Negative Take on Health 2.0 Conference Contrasts with Attendee Enthusiasm
September 22, 2007
According to iHealthBeat, the San Jose Mercury News took away from the conference the concern about the lack of solid business models for many of the products presented at the conference. While it is true that AdSense cannot be the only income source for these startups, some have more diverse business models. However, the confernce did not intend to focus on the business models, it was presenting the state of the art in this new business sector.
Perhaps the next conference on Health 2.0 being planned for March 2008, should have some sessions on successful business models including raising venture capital and longer term plans.
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Health 2.0 Conference – Social Netwoks
September 20, 2007
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. They should not necessarily participate, unless the site includes physician participation, such as, medhelp.org, but just monitor these sites. Of course this applies to all medical professionals.
The sites presented were:
- sophiasgarden.org
- PatientsLikeMe.com
- DailyStrength.org
- OrganizedWisdom.com
- Inspire.com
- MedHelp.org
- Diabetesmine.com
Health 2.0 – First Session – Are Physicians Marginalized in Health 2.0?
September 20, 2007
I am writing from the Health 2.0 conference in San Francisco. In the first session, a panel of Google, Yahoo, WebMD and Microsoft, the question was asked, Are physicians marginalized in Health 2.0?
The response was that all of these products serve physicians as well as patients/consumers. Most notibly WebMD with Medscape. Yet it was acknowledged that the effect of the the Internet on the patient-provider relationship – physicians are confronted with this on a daily basis and also frequently provide websites to their patients. But medical practice with its briefer and briefer encounters and financial pressures, does not enable an interactive discussion of internet health content.
Perhaps new models enabled by Web 2.0 will provide a bridge from the exam room to the Internet health.
Share this:Medicine 2.0 Blog Carnival
September 17, 2007
Constructive Medicine has posted the blog carnival for this week. Cites this blog as well as some interesting postings on others. Next carnival will be by Clincial Cases and Images.
One note on the thinking about Medicine 2.0: “In next generation of medicine management, diagnosis and treatment of
diseases could be based on the spirit of collaboration and sharing of patient related knowledge.”
Health 2.0 in the Economist
September 15, 2007
Tipped off by a new comment, this article on Health 2.0 is one of the first in the public media to use the term. It discusses primarily patient-facing applications like discussion boards and quotes Gilles Frydman, the founder of the Association of Online Cancer Resources (ACOR), a group which has sponsored listservs for cancer survivors since the early days of the Internet.
It also quotes a study from a few years ago show in the inaccuracies on some patient discussion boards of 8% and the problem of anonymous postings.
While these problems remain, it is helpful to see more attention to Web 2.0 in health care, especially on the eve of the first Health 2.0 conference next Thursday in San Francisco. I will be one of 400 attendees. More on that later.
Share this:Joint Commission Launches a Wiki
September 13, 2007
The quality monitoring Joint Commission has launched the WikiHealthCare – an initiative to “to foster collaboration among tens of thousands of health care professionals” on topics like patient safety and other health quality issues. This is a sea-change for the Joint Commission which traditionally acted as a regulatory agency to monitor hospital quality. Now it invites healthcare professionals to share best practices, define quality and patient safety through the interactive format of a Wiki. Initial topics include smoking cessation and the smoke-free hospital initiative. They have a helpful set of policies and guidelines to follow as well.
I can only congratulate their efforts and wait to see how these will take off.
When mainstream organizations in healthcare begin to adopt Web 2.0, then we know that Health 2.0 has arrived.
Share this:Revolution Health Lauches College Health website
September 10, 2007
Last week, Revolution Health launched a unique offering targeted to the college age demographic. The site includes information on mental health, STDs, birthcontrol, and healthy eating and sleeping. There is even a section for parents who may worry about their child’s health more than the student.
Special features seem to have an emphasis on mental health, such as, a mental health fair and crisis hotline. There is also an email newsletter on romance which appears to focus on young women and a safe drinking calculator.
The site covers the major concerns of college students. In the past, most surveys showed an older demographic using health information websites. But Revolution Health, with its Web 2.0 interface, may successfully attract this hard to reach group.
Share this:Semantic Web for Healthcare?
August 23, 2007
Is the semantic web or Web 3.0 coming to health care? In this blog on Government Health IT, there is a good explanation of the semantic web and some of the potential uses for healthcare.
“The equivalent Semantic Web technology is Resource Description Framework (RDF). Whereas HTML defines the location of data, RDF describes what that data is. Along with other technologies such as Web Ontology Language, RDF can be used to ascribe meaning to data depending on the context in which it is used.”
The potential uses are having intelligent agents find information in an increasingly dense and complex store of health information on the web for:
- Physician decision support
- bring condition-specific information to consumers
- support health science research and finding medical images
This certainly makes sense for healthcare where complex ontologies and taxonomies exist and transforming the technical into lay language is essential.
Share this:Virtual Healthcare – Future Clinic Visit
August 21, 2007
Just a quick note about a post on The Patient Advocate on a futuristic vision of virtual reality to visit doctors and specialist about a health condition. He suggests using: Semacodes, MyVu goggles, d’fusion (3-D viewing). All of this could potentially enable a Second Life visit to multiple providers. Interesting concept.
Share this:Medical Journal Podcasting Growth
August 21, 2007
Thanks to Clinical Cases author Ves Dimov for pointing out the growing number of podcasts for major medical journals. New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, JAMA, BMJ, Annals of Internal Medicine. In addition he notes the capability of putting these on your cell phone, no just iPod, MP3 player. He also reminds us of text-to-speech tools which can potentially make any journal article or blog a podcast.
My next project is to test this out. Watch for the results in a future post.
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