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Health 2.0 2009, San Francisco, Day 2: A Summary

Three CEO's and a President offered interesting perspectives on where they felt Health 2.0 was heading.  Alexandra Drane, President of Eliza, made a fascinating point about how most of the data out there is not very useful until it is cleaned with some high touch effort.  Eliza actually contacts patients to confirm and clean up data - she mentioned that 20% of the people who were reported to have diabetes, didn't have diabetes - all you have to do is ask!

Jane Sarasohn Kahn moderated a great conversation between Wayne Gattinella of WebMD, Sameer Samat of Google Health, and David Cerino of Microsoft.  I was blown away with how clean the new MS HealthVault interface looks (using Silverlight) - it was like looking at a Mac!  Google showcased a new telehealth solution, MDLiveCare, that is now integrated with their system and uses video chat to deliver medical and psychiatric services to patients.  Wayne focused heavily on their new WebMD mobile apps that he feels (and I agree) are where tools need to be delivered.  

Sanjay Koyani from the FDA showed a demo of their Twitter feeds and widgets - similar to what he shared in the Driving the Adoption of Health IT Through Innovations in Social Media.  Jamie Haywood from PatientsLikeMe discussed their recent study that was based on data gleaned from their site about lithium and Multiple Sclerosis.

Adam Bosworth did a demo of Keas today.  The site has come a long way since last year.  Care plans now help consumers improve their health by helping them keep on track with their specific disease state.  Adam described it as a "Facebook for health" which gives you steps to better health.  There is a slick integration with Quest Labs that turns the raw data into very nice visualizations that are easy to interpret.  Keas allows for some personalized and relevant data to be delivered to the patient based on their condition.  It is definitely shaping up and I look forward to seeing how it develops over the coming months.  Well done Keas, keep it simple and stay out of the red.

The Wellness 2.0 session had some great product demos that took a different spin on health and wellness.  Limeade uses a social network to help motivate wellness participation between friends, coworkers, or contests between employees.  These guys are on to something with a point based incentive/reward system driving up utilization.  ScanAvert has you put some basic info into a web interface and then take your android phone and scan item barcodes at the grocery store and it gives you all kinds of condition specific information.  Alere analyzes a broad set of data to build a personal plan then builds a healthplan that then use automated and live health coaching to keep them on track.  NutritionQuest's product Alive has an evidence based solution to improve your diet.  UsableHealth has a pretty cool hardware/software solution that combines a PHR with an automated or live dietitian to help make healthy choices.  I see most of these as great applications that should plug into one of the health aggregators.

The session closed with an incredible debate over Meaningful Use, and more interestingly, why meaningful use may be rolling out the wrong way.  Jonathan Bush stole the show with his incredibly insightful rants as well as some bizarre behavior (he stood up, took off his pants, and threw them across the stage).  I was very impressed by his thoughts on creating a marketplace for data exchange by simply rewarding the physician for the exchange of data.  Pay the physician per patient data transaction (to the government, to the hospital, to insurance companies), and this will encourage them to invest in systems that will allow them to seamlessly share the data.  The future for health innovation and reform has yet to be written, so I hope people out there were listening.

Thanks to Indu and Matt for a great conference, and I look forward to the next one!

Jason Bhan, MD
Co-Founder, Ozmosis

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