Whew! Health 2.0 Winds Down and Gears Up

31 Oct Whew! Health 2.0 Winds Down and Gears Up

1. Diminish gradually
2. Draw to a close

Well, since I am behind in my email, blogging, work, working out, and just about every other area in my life, I am using this post to begin the dig out process. There have been alot of great summary posts from the recent Health 2.0 conference including here, here, here, here, and here among many others. By all accounts is was another smashing success in terms of content, people, buzz, and mojo.  Alot of really fascinating people trying to do fascinating things at a very fascinating time for our country in general and health care specifically.

I enjoyed the show, got to meet several new people that I have only been able to collaborate with online, see old friends, and seeing alot more cool stuff. Many people asked me what the big new trends were . . . and while thinking of something really intelligent to say . . . I didn’t see that much that was “new new” but I did see alot of growth and progress on what I knew was out there. Deeper, farther, faster, more convenient, more integrated, more interesting, more possibility, more promise, and more hope. It was great to be there.

I had the chance to moderate two panels. The first was the financial management and tools panel. Unfortunately, I only heard back form one the panelist (who just totally rocked his panel by the way!) and so I did not feel very well prepared for this session. Also, the small demo session is really a tough format to complete a meaningful 4 minute demonstration as well as have adequate time to ask the panelist questions that can highlight their solutions. In retrospect, I would have had a theme of questions that tied together all the solutions as opposed to asking one off questions to highlight some of the features, functionality, or differentiation in the products. It was an interesting group – ChangeHealthcare, bWell International, Medicare Saver, Quicken Health (finally!), and Vimo – all doing related but different financial transparency and comparison work.

Confounding the above was the fact that I also had a main stage panel with NBC, Pfizer, Kaiser, and Safeway that required significantly more time preparing for and essentially following. As a result, I was forced to miss the provider communications panel that featured American Well, Myca/Hello Health, TelaDoc, and some others. Bummed about that. The main stage panel closed out the day in front of ~750 or so people that hung around. Each of the panelist was fascinating and I have full blown interviews with each of them here, here, and here (Vida – you never sent me our interview back!). Given the format, and a last minute slide crisis (“you can’t use those”) we chose to do an brief intro, a brief case study of how the company was using health 2.0, and then a planned exchange with audience questions.

Unfortunately, the case studies portion lasted a little long (but excellent contributions by all), and we only got to a brief interchange at the end. Everyone I spoke with wanted more of that, and I truly wish we would have had some time to watch Anna-Lisa, Ken, Vida, and Mitzi in a free for all. I almost wanted to pull the extemporaneous – “OK – what project could all four of your companies collaborate on right now to solve a real, big problem”. That would have been fun.

Needless to say, Health 2.0 will continue to gear up as it moves off the training tracks to the real world of disruptive innovation. Clearly not all will prove useful, however, it is within the confused raw substrate that real solutions will emerge. We all still await the Facebook of Health, the Mint.com of Health Finance, and the holy grail of ubiquitious interoperability that Micro$oft and Google have given intimations of.

So for me, the Business Case for Health 2.0 is that there are a plethora of new ways to engage patients in their health that can drive bottom line revenues. Getting to that bottom line, and demonstrating it in the traditional ROI way, however, may prove to be difficult. For example, will Kaiser’s massive spend on their EHR be worth it? I don’t know, perhaps you should ask the 3.5M visitors (and growing) who are using the patient portal every month if they are finding any value?