Health 2.0 Tools for Consumers (Part 1)

Live blogging began to catch up with me yesterday, but I am going to try to share with you, in almost real-time, the parade of health-related tools that I've been sitting through for the last hour and a half. Much to the amusement of the packed ballroom, conference organizer Matthew Holt has been parading around in a skirt and wig, impersonating a fictitous patient, Mathilda. First, Mathilda was shown an iPhone application called A.D.A.M. that allowed her to navigate through a variety of information--including videos--to help her understand her health symptoms.

Big wigs playing in personal health information arena

Next up this morning, representatives from WebMD, Microsoft HealthVault, Aetna, Google Health, and Yahoo! Health are giving presentations and demonstrations of consumer-targetted health information aggregator platforms. Most of these are variations on personal health records (PHR) that can send out health-related alerts to their users; offer online coaches and medication management applications; and generally provide a (hopefully) convenient and secure place for consumers to store and access their personal health information.

Let's conference!

I haven't even finished blogging about our own health conference last week, and already I am deeply immersed in the Health 2.0 conference.

This morning, Clay Shirky gave the opening keynote. He is a great speaker (you can click here to watch the video of Clay discussing his book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School). He addressed physicist PW Anderson's idea that "more is different," that a mass of things behave differently together than they do individually. Clay hit in on three key areas of change: information, coordination, and collaboration. My biggest take-away fell under his discussion of information. Noting that people are the most valuable part of the Internet, Clay observed that information flows to where people trust each other. "Trust is in the eye of the beholder," and it is not about technology.

Mobile Health Conference, Day 2 (Part 1)

My disclaimer of the moment is that I am not very comfortable with live blogging.  But I am going to take a stab at it right now.  The conference's afternoon session is underway, and Mani Pande has just provided us with an overview of innovations in mobile health in the global south.  Paul Meyer, co-founder and president of Voxiva, is talking about how his company approaches the delivery of health information solutions, including data collection and analysis. 

Mobile Health Conference, Day 1

Wow!  With the disclaimer that this may be a biased opinion, I have to say that the first day of our conference on "Reinventing Health Care in a Mobile World" was a great success.  My colleagues, Rachel Maguire and Anthony Townsend, set the context for thinking about how mobility and technology are coming together to form the basis for the future of mobile health.  Miriam Lueck and Jason Tester explained how we created and executed HealthRaising, our month-long immersive experience that used text messaging to promote health-related goals and raise our collective health score.  They then welcomed Eric Holmen (Smart Reply) and Kara Chanasyk (Stanford's Persuasive Technology Lab) to the stage for a discussion about how people respond to this type of mobile persuasion. 

Yet more on mobile health

Okay, okay.  I confess that I have mobile health on my brain.  But I swear I didn't seek out this item.  I was simply visiting one of my regular blog sources--"Technology, Health & Development: Finding global health solutions through innovation and technology"--and came across this entry about new mobile phone medical apps.  One is a low-cost (less than $100) electrocardiogram (ECG) machine that would use cell phones to transmit data to a computer where it can be analyzed and reviewed by a doctor.  Another is a tumor-imaging application.

Mobile Health is a hot topic in the press (and at IFTF!)

Last month, IFTF Research Affiliate Richard Adler blogged here about a Wall Street Journal article that discussed tools that help patients interact with doctors.  Richard specifically mentioned a mobile device called Zuri; the article also discussed an in-home device from Intel called Health Guide.  According to Intel, Health Guide, which has received FDA market clearance,

can connect to specific models of wired and wireless medical devices, including blood pressure monitors, glucose meters, pulse oximeters, peak flow meters and weight scales. [It] stores and
displays the collected information on a touch screen and sends to a secure host server, where health care professionals can review the information. Patients using the Health Guide can monitor their health status, communicate with care teams and learn about their medical conditions.

The article also mentions that Microsoft's HealthVault can also integrate data from about 50 devices, such as heart rate monitors and blood pressure machines.

Revolution Health is evolving to compete with WebMD

Several months ago, rumors began to swirl around the fate of Revolution Health, Steve Case's foray into the world of online health.  You can read about those early reports here.  Within the last few weeks, new stories began to circulate that the company was looking to sell itself. E-Patients.net suggested that the fate of Revolution--a hot social networking site when launched in 2007--was "another tale of hubris in the e-health sector," quoting a pre-launch blog post from Case himself:

We aim to build RevolutionHealth.com into the world's leading health site - and we hope that our focus on an engaging design, high levels of personalization, and an unparalleled sense of community will enable us to achieve that goal. But we're far more than a web site. We're a company that's trying to fundamentally change the health care system. Revolution Health is about making sense of the complicated world of health care. And it's about putting you-the patient-at the center of that world.

Climate change and public health

This Reuters headline--"Climate change seen aiding spread of deadly diseases"--brought back memories of our Green Health map and conference.  In 2003, the World Health Organization published a report on  climate change as a significant and emerging threat to public health, noting that many important diseases (such as malaria and dengue, as well as malnutrition and diarrhea) are highly sensitive to changing temperatures
and precipitation. 

Raising our Collective Health

Yikes.  I haven't blogged in weeks.  Well, that's not entirely true.  I had written a long post that got eaten by the computer, and I haven't been the same since.  But news of HealthRaising, a current Health Horizons project, deserves to be shared.