The Great Glut of Health 2.0

I was asked today from a patient what I thought about IT in healthcare. This is the perfect example - the programs that add real value to the patient either improve access, wait times or accuracy. But they have to be tightly integrated into the flow of the practice and that is time consuming and difficult. It is easier just to by/rent a service and repackage it. the same applies to practices, it's not so easy to incorporate an IT initiative without some serious thought, work and money. I guess that is why so many of these companies don't last 5 yrs. www.waittimes.blogspot.com

As longtime publishers in the healthcare industry, we, too, are skeptical about the glut of startups in this area. However, for healthcare organizations with an established Web presence, adding some Web/Health 2.0 features appears to be working. The reality is that prospective patients are asking to see the doctors featured in the video or podcasts, and recruiters are getting resumes from job candidates who heard about them on YouTube or Facebook. While we have been blogging and podcasting for some time, we were inspired to make a video --- our first --- on this subject featuring the successes of the Mayo Clinic, UAB Health System and others in this area. You can see the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ko-sLX7QOak

Health 2.0 companies devoted to developing social networks strike me as embodying a very basic misunderstanding of what's possible or probable, in health or any other group-building pursuit.

I'm reading Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody, in which he observes (among many other interesting things) that the internet (plus, sometimes, other telecom-assisted technologies) basically crush the cost of social-group-formation failure. They don't ensure, or predict, or support success - they make failing cheap.

That delivers advantage to low/no-cost trials - lots & lots of them. Because predicting which ones will "work" - be of use to the members who they ostensibly form to serve - is well-nigh impossible.

That does NOT give advantage to merely cleverly-named, or even very well-thought-out, Health 2.0 social network entrants. Those I've peered at seem only to be providing very basic group collaboration tools (tagging, calendar, rss, etc) that do little to specially address particular 'health' needs at all.

'Forcing' group formation seems a lot like pushing a rope - and a poorly woven rope at that.

On the other hand, there are at least a few enterprises that self-identify as part of whatever Health 2.0 is that are building useful health care tools that a variety of individuals AND/OR social networks, Health 2.0 or not, might find useful. I'd put Safe-Med in that category.

Not that I'm a stickler for accuracy or anything, but Dr. O you didn't attend the Health 2.0 Conference last year either--unless you believe that gatecrashing a party uninvited is "attending".

But what exactly are you so surprised about? New companies promoting themselves in effusive terms in press releases? Is that a new new thing? I don't think so.

If you were to look at the data you'd see the tremendous growth in internet users using and contributing to user-generated content online--that is the core of Health 2.0. If you're really struggling for a definition just choose one of the several that are out there, or make up your own.

But suggesting that there's nothing going on here because most start-ups are going to fail betrays your very poor understanding of how markets work.

And other than that your article says nothing.

Matthew Holt
co-founder, Health 2.0 Conference