Archive for June, 2009
In Defense of Writers
June 30, 2009
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.
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The Future of Web 2.0
June 26, 2009
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.
Share this:Peter Neupert on Healthcare Reform
June 10, 2009
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.
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