Healthcare 2.0: hype or reality?

Tomorrow I’m giving a lecture on Healthcare 2.0, trends that will drive the future of our healthcare system. While preparing my slides, it came to my mind that the Internet will end up by rationalizing, and making transparent all of those forces that have contributed to the current health care market failure.

Health 2.0 will be a game changer, wikis, mash-ups, videos, bloggers, and assemblers of user-generated data – all designed to connect health care consumers, providers, and players in a seamless web of data and ideas.

Health 2.0 will provide simple applications allowing the use of information at the site of care by end-users, that is patients and doctors and everybody else connected to health care. A winning combination of evidence-based information, sophisticated algorithms, centralized data repositories, and user-generated data will hold health 2.0 together

Websites such as Sermo or patients like me are gaining speed at attracting physicians and patients. Other European initiatives, such as esanum are coming to the marketplace as well.