Healthcare: What Version Are We On Now? Health 2.0, 3.0, 4.0?
The “Health 2.0″ movement is about “consumer directed healthcare” and proposes to empower patients with online tools and technologies to help them manage their care and take control of their health. Some Health 2.0 initiatives have been quite popular – though many suffer from lack of participation on the part of consumers. Having your own personal health record sounds great – but when you’re the one who has to manually enter the majority of the data into it, only the most motivated patients will participate. Access to online physician ratings is appealing – but when everyone wants to read the ratings, but no one takes the time to complete the ratings questionnaire, the value of the tool is lost.
Over the past few years there have been a number of regularly repeating conferences created to unify key stakeholders around healthcare’s digital agenda – Health 2.0, Health Care Consumerism, The Healthcare Globalization Summit, Health 3.0, New Media Expo, Blog World Expo, Health 4.0, the AMA’s Medical Communications Conference, and more. Thankfully, these disparate groups with overlapping agendas are beginning to consolidate – offering new mega conferences that simplify the learning and relationship-building process.
My observation as an attendee of several of these conferences is that providers and patients are still not coming together as they should. Online healthcare solutions tend to be created in a lopsided manner – either by consumer/patient groups without much provider input, or by providers/health plans/governmental agencies without much patient/consumer input. The result tends to produce two types of products 1) active online groups and tools that facilitate both helpful information and misinformation or 2) products that advance good concepts, but have low participation due to lack of user-friendliness.
The current conference version “arms race” (to attract the most powerful vendors and largest audience possible) is not terribly helpful. Whether you associate with Health 2.0, 3.0 or 4.0 – the bottom line is that the Internet is a powerful force in healthcare. It can provide many different kinds of tools that make valuable contributions to health education, care management, behavior modification, emotional support, and improved quality outcomes. In the wrong hands it can also mislead patients, promote snake oil, sensationalize health news, confound research efforts, misinform, and mislead.
There is no more critical time than this for providers and patients to join forces to guide the development of new online health initiatives. The successful execution of digital health platforms requires a patient-provider partnership – I can only hope that upcoming conferences will embrace this view more fully.
In my next few blog posts, I’ll provide you with some fascinating interviews with key opinion leaders from the recent Consumer Health World mega-conference in Arlington, Virginia. The interviews are as follows, so stay tuned:
1. Skip Brickley, founder of Consumer Health World
2. Joseph Heyman, M.D., Chair, Board of Trustees, the American Medical Association
3. Emme Levin Deland, Senior Vice president, Strategy, New York Presbyterian Hospital
4. Joseph Kvedar, M.D., Director, Center For Connected Health, Partners Healthcare
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