Remixing healthcare

Everywhere we look, our culture has been digitized, resequenced, and reassembled. Our culture is being remixed. We live in the age of mash-ups. Digital media allows itself to cutting, pasting, sampling, and compositing, and the urge to “mix” things to create something of greater value has driven the internet industry forward. An entrepreneur, for example, takes some google maps, adds some flickr photos, then adds some GPS tracking, shakes everything, and voilà, he can offer a new website offering pictures around the earth. The healthcare information technology industry will profit as well from this trend. First initiatives are being created now.

For example, Who is sick is a public health mashup remixing “social networking health information" plus "Google maps". Just imagine the public health possibilities. You post sickness information onto the map (completely anonymous), then you can search and filter for sickness by location, time, symptoms, etc… You can see sickness trends and current outbreaks. You have to see it to believe it, give it a try.

Patients rating their doctors in a social networking tool (RateMD), social sites helping patients locate friends with the same disease, (Patientslikeme),… you name it. The trend is definitely coming to healthcare.

And yes, reckless as it may seem, how about remixing social networking (facebook) with understanding one's genome (23andme) in the future? (see as well my previous post on 23andme). Maybe people would use the web to share their genomic information in meaningful ways. Maybe people would be interested in mashing-up genetic profiles of “great” tennis players to characterise common characteristics of being a great tennis player. Society would get attracted to genomics, get passionate about it, and this would change many things for sure.