This is another installment in my chronicle of my attendance at the conference Health 2.0: User-Generated Healthcare 2008 held October 22 – 23 at The Marriott, San Francisco. The intended audience for this saga is primarily medical librarians and anyone interested in medical/health search and Web 2.0 in healthcare. This is a conference and a movement that it would behoove those across the health care and medical occupational spectra to consider attending or at least following the development of.

The second day I did considerably better at networking than I did the first day, when I asked a rather tactlessly phrased and somewhat incoherently expressed question about the business model of Patients Like Me (i.e. an innovative but unproven strategy of hoping that enough patients will self-report data and that that data will prove itself marketable to a sufficient number of pharmaceutical companies and other buyers to keep PLM in business). The second day some kindly souls told me that questions like mine needed to be asked given that so many of the questions being asked of presenters tended to be of the softball variety.

I do wish to emphasize here that I really do think that the founders of this conference Indu Subaiya, MD and Matthew Holt have done important work in developing this concept and in fostering a growing cohort of spokespeople and evangelists. My comments here are meant as constructive criticism from someone who wishes the movement well and wishes it to attract those in the medical mainstream who, after all, form the bulk of those who need to be enlightened on the tenets and merits of the Health 2.0 movement.

The second day of the two-day conference started off with a series of three one-on-one interviews grouped under the rubric, “3 Health 2.0 CEOs.”

The first one was of Jonathan Bush, AthenaHealth, interviewed by the Wall Street Journal’s Chris Lawton. This was rather comical in that Bush made his comments at the speed of light and seemed puzzled by Lawton’s tenuous grasp of the subject. As a blogger, I do get a little impatient with the mainstream media’s lock on interviews at times like this. Lawton just didn’t seem to know the subject well and Bush seemed poised to start interviewing himself just to get things going at his preferred blazing pace. If I were a doctor in a practice with billing headaches, I would look into Bush’s firm. He was hilariously up front about wanting to make mucho moolah from doctors but being fair to them in the process.

Kerry Hicks, Healthgrades, was then interviewed by quality expert Michael Millenson. A major weakness of these three interviews was that many of us in the audience were not familiar with the services under discussion. Screenshots while the interviews were being conducted or a preliminary demo of each service would have illuminated matters.

I just tried Healthgrades and even though I specified the city and specialty I was looking for, I was given the names of three doctors, only one of which was in the city and specialty I had specified. At least that one was right, but you have to pay for the report. I just don’t see this as a compelling offering, given that so much similar information is now being provided by health care organizations themselves or by governmental entities due to increasing public pressure for transparency.

Daniel Palestrant of Sermo, was then interviewed by BNET’s David Hamilton who, though less so than Lawton, seemed a bit unprepared and the smooth and data-ready Palestrant was sometimes left waiting for a question to answer. Medical librarians and the general public (particularly eagle-eyed consumer health advocates) should follow the rise of Sermo. Why? Because it is growing at a steady clip and physicians are using it to get quick answers and not turning either to medical librarians or even the databases they curate. Instead, they confer with other physicians via Sermo. Consumer and patient advocates might regard Sermo’s ties to Bloomberg, Pfizer and investment analysts as overly cozy and worrisome and regard such insider schmoozing outside of the public eye (as membership in Sermo is restricted to US-licensed physicians) as inherently corrupting or at the very least hedged with ethical hazards. Palestrant (he would, wouldn’t he?) argued that such relationships are win-win for everyone involved, that information exchange on such matters as the efficacy of drugs in real-world settings by doctors and information exchange between doctor and those higher up at pharmaceutical companies than the traveling detail man is to the benefit of patients. Maybe. I will leave that to the ethicists. But Sermo is clearly a well-run service in terms of management and technology.

I found the session Health 2.0 Around the World a little dull and primarily of interest to those interested in global public health and in the difficulties of doing health-related e-commerce in Europe. The most interesting points were that cell phones are the main Internet access point for much of the world.

Now, here is the tough love part of today’s column. The value for attendees and presenters of the session Tools for Consumers pretty well obliterated by Matthew Holt’s baaaaad decision to engage in the vulgar burlesque of appearing in drag. Now, there are people who find men in skirts screamingly funny. I have never found it so and there were several reasons why this gag got old very quickly. First of all, it went on the entire session. It might have been amusing for 15 minutes or so, but Holt pranced about as a woman for the entire hour-plus session and spoke in a falsetto that rendered his already sometimes poor enunciation even more difficult to comprehend than usual. Also, there was a tiresome sexist tone in many of the presentations (e.g., wisecracks about breasts but never about male anatomy). Many of the hypothetical patients seemed to be stereotypical neurotic menopausal dopes. Given that much of the conference was about patient empowerment (though I don’t see I saw a single actual patient advocate), the drag act undermined the potency of that message. I almost walked out of this session, so frustrating was it to try to glean information from presenters forced to play along in a somewhat degrading fashion with Holt’s antics at the expense of professional presentation of their product or service. Holt did his presenters and conference no favor with his ill-judged theatrics. There is much of value in Health 2.0 for nurse managers, medical librarians and health care administrators, but I would have been mortified had I invited members of those fields to this particular session. I had been quite eager to see demos of such products Navigenics, DestinationRx, PharmaSurveyor, 23andme and DoubleCheckMD, all of which readers of this blog might find of interest and worth looking over. But their presentations were rendered distinctly unmemorable given the frat house level humor. Levity has its place, but it didn’t belong here–at least not for the entire time. And then there was the fact that several of the panels at the conference were entirely male. There are women in health care and in tech, I have been told!

The lunch session featured some interesting previews of some truly useful innovative products. TheCarrot.com is yet another consumer health tracking system. rVita is an interesting attempt to enable those interested in complementary and alternative medicine to determine what credentials practitioners have and what practices have won some acceptance in mainstream medical circles. This is a potentially useful service for medical librarians and public librarians who are attempting to assist patrons with such matters and for consumers who are interested in complementary therapies but cautious in their approach to them.

The session, Getting Past the Privacy Conundrum. was made memorable for me by the presentation by Robert Shelton, CEO, Private Access. I have never before been in a situation where I saw unveiled something that could make a huge impact in the lives of millions of people in a matter of a few years. Recruiting for clinical trials is a time-consuming, labor-intensive process. The bottlenecks in that process and the fact that patients with illnesses in which research on the very early stages of the disease process is crucial (e.g., amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) are unfamiliar with the very concept of clinical trials is preventing scientific progress. The powerful suite of tools that Private Access offers (such as RecruitSource, TrialsFinder, RecordsAgent and PrivacyLayer) hold great promise in expediting the clinical trial process to the great benefit of the researchers devoting their lives and employing their brain power to benefit patients. I have been thinking about Private Access for days and hope to write more about it. If you love someone with a serious illness or have one that needs research or if you are professionally involved in clinical research and patient recruitment, take a look at Private Access. If there were a Nobel Prize for Innovation for the Public Good, Mr. Shelton and his team would win it. It is so heartening to see businesses that hire brilliant people to accomplish great things. This would be not only a feel good investment, it would pay off in the end because this firm is serving a need that is not being served by anyone else.

I next attended two panel sessions on Search. One overriding impression I got from the search sessions at Health 2.0 was that the consumer health sites such as RightHealth, Organized Wisdom, Wellsphere and Healia are more and more emphasizing the patient social communities on their sites. This has some serious implications for those of us in the medical library community and those interested in good quality health information on the Web. How so? Well, increasingly the results of health topic searches in the major search engines (Google et al) are links to the consumer heath sites rather than to the gold standard of authoritative health information, PubMed and MedlinePlus. Now, not only are consumers being taken to the commercial health sites they aren’t even being referred to sources such as medical encyclopedias but instead will more and more be referred to discussions between laymen on the pages of online patient communities. Much of that information is perfectly fine and harmless, but it is going to lessen links to more traditional sources of information, much to the dismay, probably, of librarians and public health experts. This is a trend to watch and that does not seem to be much discussed in the medical library community—and should be. Interestingly, when I brought this matter up, the one representative of the consumer health sites who said his firm was going to stick with expert-vetted material and not go the social community route was West Shell, CEO, Healthline Networks.

One of the most interesting search engines demoed in the search panels was HealthLibrarian: Its interface is blah, but it is worth a look by medical librarians and those who want to add search capability to hospital and other health care organization Web sites.

One of the vendors that had a booth was a potential rival to Patients Like Me: WeAre.Us. Its business model and operational framework differ from PLM in that users can create their own communities. The look of the site is quite handsome and user-friendly. I think this firm has real potential. There do seem to be those out there who enjoy interactions with others with the same illness but who for one reason or another don’t feel comfortable in the PLM realm (or whose illness is not one of PLM’s featured conditions) and who like neither the interface nor framework of sites like MedHelp. From the site: “If there is no cost, how does WeAre.Us make money?

Corporate, private, and community sponsorships provide funding for operating costs of the site.”

We shall see what happens with this model. It doesn’t feature the rich disease management tracking tools that PLM offers nor the cohort of medical experts of MedHelp, but it might fly in the world of user-generated health care that was the theme of this conference.

The concluding panel was Looking ahead—The Business and Society of Health 2.0 and was mostly preaching to the choir about the need for reform of the US healthcare system.

All in all, a very worthwhile experience and I would guess that this conference will grow in reputation and in number of attendees. I would certainly recommend it to those interested in medical search, health care informatics, patient advocacy, disease organizations, patient accounts and practice management among many fields.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 28th, 2008 at 10:00 am and is filed under Newcomers, News, Reviews, Verticals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.