Managed Care - March 2008 - (Page 50) ging network called Trusted.MD, (http://trusted. md) wrote a pointed letter to Modern Healthcare in December, urging people to view health 2.0 with a wary eye for fear of a repeat of the late 1990s. “Beware of the movement driven by inflated hopes and dreams instead of hard metrics and supporting evidence,” he cautioned. Four-step continuum So what exactly is this notion of health 2.0? Matthew Holt, San Francisco-based health IT consultant and primary author of the Health Care Blog (www.thehealthcareblog.com), identifies a fourstep continuum of health 2.0: user-generated content; users connecting to health care providers; formation of partnerships to reform delivery; and data leading to new knowledge. There is no set definition of Web 1.0, but it is generally seen as being a one-way form of communication. Think lectures rather than conversation, Third is the use of such tools to create “huge, consumer-centered change in health care,” says Holt. “If you are doing that, then you are really getting the health care system involved.” Ultimately, data collected by health 2.0 Web sites will help advance drug discovery and technology improvements. Yet, some are making real progress in bringing people together for the purpose of better health care. Sermo (www.sermo.com), an online networking and idea-exchange site expressly for physicians, claims nearly 50,000 members since its inception in September 2006. Some sites should also be able to return information to the consumer, according to Indu Subaiya, who is “entrepreneur in residence” at Physic Ventures and who joined with Holt to stage the first conference on health 2.0 technologies last September (another was planned for early this month in San Diego). One health 2.0 site was described as “a massive brainstorming session” with “no rules . . . no hierarchies.” traditional advertising vs. word-of-mouth. Web 2.0 — and, by extension, health 2.0 — is just the opposite. In the first stage of Holt’s continuum, companies and people use Web 2.0 technologies — interactive and social media, such as blogging, networking, and video — that are not connected to anything. “That’s pretty much where we are now,” says Holt. Some people like to lump search engines into this broad category. “If you include search, it’s pretty much everybody who goes online for health care,” Holt says. Some specialized search engines might qualify as health 2.0, even Google, which has a blog search. The second stage is “using lightweight tools for consumers and providers to connect with each other,” according to Holt. A nascent site, PatientDeals (http://patientdeals.org), falls into this category. Carrying the tagline “Will you be paying with cash today?” PatientDeals seeks to match uninsured patients with providers willing to offer discounts. Editor’s Note: You may have noticed that we capitalize Web 2.0 but not health 2.0. This is because Web is a shortening of World Wide Web, a proper noun, whereas health 2.0 is just a concept, a common noun. Subaiya says that sites are maturing in the sense that data collected by them are starting to flow into standardized, usable database formats. “Also, companies are taking things that were formerly opaque and making them [understandable] by consumers,” the San Francisco physician adds. She says that some in the pharmacy benefit management industry have begun to disrupt old ways of doing business by making their operations somewhat more transparent to large employers. Still, it takes a lot for the typical corporate culture to get comfortable with the idea of opening up a Web page for the public to post to, which may explain why so many health 2.0 companies are startups. Companies can find bad news distasteful, says Smith. Disease management programs are “most ready to talk about this,” Smith says, though interactive media often do not make sense from an actuarial perspective because disease management is so targeted and is a high-risk, high-expense proposition. New language “Learning to engage in open media is like learning a new language,” says Kruglyak, who is involved in one of the few large-scale interactive sites from 50 MANAGED CARE / MARCH 2008 http://trusted.md http://trusted.md http://www.sermo.com http://www.thehealthcareblog.com http://patientdeals.org
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