Mike Yuan has a review of the most promising startups from the Health2.0 conference.
Perhaps the most important aspect of Health 2.0 is for consumers to take responsibility for their own health, and take proactive actions to live a more healthy life style. Tools that help consumers to change their behavior in this way were featured prominently at the conference. One launch in this category that got quite a bit of fanfare was the beta launch of Keas. Started by Adam Bosworth, who used to run Google Health and of the BEA fame, Keas is a web site that provides personalized wellness/healthcare action plans based on a user’s personal health information, including both self-report questionnaires and medical records. Users can also share information about what treatment works and what doesn’t in self-organized online communities. You can read more about Keas here. While Keas is focused on bringing web 2.0-style health programs to the general public, US Prevention Medicine (USPM) has been selling web-based wellness, disease prevention, and disease management programs to employers for several years. Companies like Keas and USPM provide a clear case for ROI for Health 2.0 — it saves money to motivate consumers to take better care of themselves.
The online platform is arguably not the best tool for gathering the kind of detailed life stream data that truly drives behavior change. After all, few of us would check out our weight/blood glucose/cholesterol trends on a PC before we eat a big meal, and few would log the calories on a PC after that meal. The mobile platform is much better suited for both data gathering and trending. TheCarrot is an iPhone app that tracks a large number of activities in daily life, and they have a sleek web site that will let you plot any two matrix against each other to discover, say, whether exercise triggers your headaches. Polka is another cool iPhone app that manages a mini-PHR right on the iPhone, with the capability to record data streams on the phone and manage the data with a variety of interesting tools they have integrated into their web site.
Mobile is the right platform for health2.0. There no question that health2.0 technologies can provide tremendous benefits to consumers and transform the healthcare landscape. The biggest hurdle is not technical but instituational. Most of the healthcare information is controled by healthcare providers and they are not opening it up anytime soon.