Very interesting article by Brian Klepper.

http://www.thehealthcareblog.com/the_health_care_blog/2008/10/an-impending-ha.html

“The other big idea is that the Web can facilitate the efficient aggregation and reformulation of knowledge and data to create new information that is not only descriptive, but prescriptive, evaluating complex situational configurations and recommending next steps based on current best knowledge and experiential data. Health care is fundamentally an information-based discipline, and the Web catapults us way beyond individual expertise to the organically evolving wisdom of mass collaboration.”

This is precisely what Gazoont does at its core.

From ‘Google to Offer Health Records On the Web’ in today’s Wall Street Journal (page D1):

HealthVault, launched in October, offers a number of personal health record options. One called icePHR from CapMed, a unit of Bio-Imaging Technologies Inc. that was an early developer of personal health records, allows users to designate specific information to be available to responders in case of an emergency. Users then print out instructions on how to access the record on a wallet-size emergency card. The service costs $10 a year per family.

You may find the article here (subscription may be required).

We at PointClear helped CapMed develop their online PHR products, icePHR and onlinePHR, and we are extremely proud of CapMed and excited about the press they are getting. Congratulations, CapMed! Woohoo!

Now, how can we help you achieve the same level of success? Contact us and find out.

While this is clearly part of the marketing effort Microsoft launched yesterday with the advent of HealthVault, Bill Gates has an interesting op-ed piece in today’s Wall Street Journal (may require subscription). He makes some interesting points, the general tone of which I agree. First, he addesses the data silos that exist in the various part of our massive healthcare system and the problem of data liquidity:

At the heart of the problem is the fragmented nature of the way health information is created and collected. Few industries are as information-dependent and data-rich as health care. Every visit to a doctor, every test, measurement, and procedure generates more information. But every clinic, hospital department, and doctor’s office has its own systems for storing it. Today, most of those systems don’t talk to each other.

This is a topic near and hear to us here at PointClear, and was of particular interest to folks at the Health 2.0 conference.

The problem is, how does one maintain security and privacy once the walls of the silos start breaking down? Microsoft may do a great job securing the HealthVault platform, but what about all the third-party vendors and partners who write applications that use HealthVault? If health information sloshes back and forth between these third parties, and some of the third parties have insufficient security which can potentially lead to data breaches, then how secure is HealthVault in practice?

That makes this comment by Mr. Gates a little frightening:

No one company can — or should — hope to provide the single solution to make all of this possible. That’s why Microsoft is working with a wide range of software and hardware companies, as well as with physicians, hospitals, government organizations, patient advocacy groups and consumers to ensure that, together, we can address critical issues like privacy, security and integration with existing applications.

The ‘wide range’ of companies Microsoft intend to work with would seem to have a negative impact on ‘issues like privacy, security’.

At 11:15, thje Social Media panel took the stage. Very interesting solutions and a great contrast to search. The name of the game here is all about user-generated content and connecting folks with similar medical conditions or interests. The panelists include Sophia’s Garden, PatientsLikeMe, Daily Strength, OrganizedWisdom, Inspire, MedHelp International and DiabetesMine (a great blog, by the way).

One is left with the question: isn’t much of this already covered by other community sites like Facebook and MySpace?

See some more liveblogging of Health 2.0 con here.

Video of the conference is being done by icyou.com can be seen here.

There was an interesting panel discussion with several health vertical search companies. All of the panelists did a five minute demo of the solutions, and all were most impressive. The general use case all were tasked with was to show how each company’s solution responds when searching on a simple term: ‘diabetes’. Each vertical search response was extremely complex, attempting to show a dizzying array of information in a compelling way for the user—a daunting task indeed. I was struck with the idea of how specialized this information is, and I wonder if the general user would be able to draw reasonable conclusions from this sometimes very technical data? Some users may not even have the vocabulary to describe the problem they are experiencing. Isn’t this the role of the ultimate in personalized search, the clinician?

The Search in Healthcare panel includes Healia, Kosmix, Microsoft and Google.

The topic of data liquidity involves the basic problem of how to get information out of and between the various data ‘silos’ that exist in Healthcare IT. The classic approach to this problem is to establish a ‘gold standard’ for communication to which all players agree. The best candidate for this gold standard would be the CCR, but it is far from approaching total ‘semantic interoperability’, using Peter Neupert of Microsoft’s term. (For example, CCR currently has no mechanism for handling financial transaction data).

Peter made great point. Rather than spend time on striving for the perfect interoperability standard, the truth of the matter is that data consumers will simply have to implement multiple standards in order to talk to multiple data source. A good metaphor for this is the how a similar problem has been solved in the financial sector. When one uses something like Microsoft Money or Quicken, there are multiple sources of financial data, including one’s Bank, brokerage accounts, credit card accounts, etc. While there are several competing standards, no one standard has become dominant.

For healthcare, this implies that it may be a while before we achieve total data interoperability: unfortunately, working with various data sources will almost always require some degree of custom implementation. There may be some standards, like CCR, that help solve a lot of problems, but there will often be data that exist outside of the standards.

8:15 – Introductory Speech at the Healthcare 2.0 conference – Matthew Holt

Matthew Holt and Indu Sabaiya opened the conference. After taking care of the logistics for the conference, Matthew showed a series of slides on the following topic:

What is Health 2.0?

According the Matthew’s best guess, Health 2.0 promises the following:

• Personalized search that finds the right answer for the long tail
• Better presentation of complex medical, integrated data
• Communities that capture the accumulated knowledge of patients and caregivers—as well clinicians
• Empowering the consumer to make decisions

Matthew then showed a cartoon with a lady sitting in a doctor’s office, working on her laptop. The caption reads ‘looking for a cheaper doctor on e-bay’. Is this the promise of Health 2.0? That by empowering patients we introduce market forces that can help reduce the costs of healthcare while maintaining or improving health services?
Health 2.0 in a nutshell is ‘User-Generated Healthcare’.

Holt feels Search is still the dominant part of Health 2.0

Another way to look a current problem in Health 2.0 is as follows: we have excellent content on the one hand, and we have detailed information about healthcare-related transactions (e.g. Insurance EOBs). However, there is not a really efficient way to bridge the two. (Note: this problem is something for which Gazoont has wonderful solution.)

What is the continuum of Health 2.0?
User-generated health care > Users connect to providers (we are here) > Partnerships to reform delivery > Data drives discovery

Next up: panel with Google, Microsoft, WebMD and Yahoo.