PRx Blog

A Preview of Health 2.0 with Matthew Holt

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I am speaking with Matthew Holt, a San Francisco-based healthcare policy guru and entrepreneur, founder of The Health Care Blog and co-founder of successful Health 2.0 conference, which will take place in San Francisco on October 7 and 8.

Matthew, congratulations on coming up to the 4th annual Health 2.0 conference. Given your original tagline, "user-generated healthcare," you certainly have foresight into where healthcare is now and will be going.

Do you see that tagline as being relevant for a long time?

User-generated content in healthcare will become more and more relevant, and we get contributions of information and data from more and more people, reporting on their conditions, their experiences, using tools that track their care consciously or automatically. And then that data stream will be picked up by more sophisticated analytic tools, and used in the decision-making process by consumers, providers and everyone else.

It's actually the first part of our four stages of Health 2.0:

1) User-generated healthcare
2) Consumers connecting with providers using simple tools
3) Partnerships using Health 2.0 technologies to reform delivery, and
4) Data (from all those processes) being used to change clinical decisions and eventually drug discovery. But all those stages are going on simultaneously and we're really just getting started.

Eventually, the division between user-generated content and expert-created content will disappear, and no one will realize that we were having this conversation back in the day...

What do you see as the most important technologies in healthcare that will help move the mountain of Health Reform?

Email. Web tools for communication between doctors and patients. Self-service information tools for patients. On- and off-line communities for patients (and others) for support advice and information.

The rest of health reform needs aggressive government regulation and financing reform, which it might just get some of if we're lucky post PPACA (Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act).

I'm sure you're seeing some interesting companies and products to showcase next month. Can you give our audience a sneak peek into some of the companies to watch? Some of the sessions which you're particularly excited about?

Just too many to count. We've collected a database of over 650 companies doing interesting things. We feel like they’re all our babies, so I'm loathe to pick winners but here's a few that we're reviewed in recent days:

Tweet What You Eat - a food diary using crowdsourcing to guess calories of things that are not in the USDA database and Twitter (simple & ingenious) to record information.

iMoveYou - uses Twitter, Facebook and more to challenge friends and friends of friends to do better in health, exercise and more. Started by Jen McCabe a former Health 2.0 conference intern, so that one, we're very proud of!

Performance Clinical Systems – A SaaS based presentation layer for getting admission orders off paper in small hospitals. It does what the big EMR vendors do for a fraction of the cost

All of these are small, relatively unknown companies. We also have some much bigger players including Microsoft, Google and WebMD doing interesting stuff supporting and integrating new tools and technologies.

And we have several sessions showing developers integrating government data into their systems and answering 11 challenges we have incubated as part of the Health 2.0 Developer Challenge. US Department of Health and Human Services CTO Todd Park and Federal CTO Aneesh Chopra will be here to highlight that session

Oh, and we'll be hosting the two biggest start-up launches of this (or any recent year). The first is Sharecare, with WebMD founder Jeff Arnold & Dr Oz and many more, and the other one is Castlight Health, which just raised $80m in venture funding to blow up and reinvent healthcare shopping for employees and consumers.

What kinds of companies and products do you look for when you're selecting presenters at Health 2.0?

Innovative, easily intuitive, tackling an obvious problem in a new way; not afraid to tilt at windmills, and of course, one that will demo well!

How have you seen Health 2.0 impact the players in healthcare – vendors, physicians, patients, pharma, biotech, insurers and so forth?

Anyone who touches the consumer is starting to realize that this matters. Everyone else is in for a rude shock when they understand that the Web 2.0 tools that are getting used at the edges of healthcare will be invading their enterprises--in the not-too-distant future.

Is there anything you'd like to say which I haven't asked?

Thanks for asking.

We're running a short meeting before the main conference called Patients 2.0 in which some remarkable patients and caregivers will be telling their stories. We've always had patients sprinkled through Health 2.0, and increasingly we're just giving them their own sessions and letting them lead.

Please have your clients and readers get involved in the Health 2.0 community, come to the conferences, listen to the webinars, get involved in the Health 2.0 Developer Challenge. We've been going for four years, but this is really just starting.

Matthew, thank you very much for your time. We look forward to seeing you in San Francisco next month.