Today I’m in San Francisco for the Health 2.0 conference, billed as “User-Generated Health Care.” Organized by my pal Matthew Holt and his partner, Indu Subaiya, "Health 2.0" references "Web 2.0," social networking, applied to health care.

 

The meeting will feature top executives from high and low profile IT firms that either are already dedicated to or hope to play an important role in health care, like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Intel, Cisco, WebMD, Revolution Health, AthenaHealth, Sermo, and many other lesser known organizations, all discussing their strategies for leveraging data in new ways to create value for all health care constituencies.

 

Elsewhere, I’ve referred to this as a “significant portion of market-based health care reform, with NONE of the usual suspects." What I mean by this is that, by and large, the players working in this space are NOT the people we've typically seen at important health care conferences in the past, and they may be pooh-poohed by many longstanding health care power players. That could prove an error in judgment.

 

At one level, many Health 2.0 sites are about patients creating content for other patients based on their own experiences, and by doing so contributing to a larger body of knowledge about what’s important when dealing with a particular condition.

 

But at another level, Health 2.0 is, in a very real sense, about corporations creating information that moves the locus of power in health care away from health care corporations and to the patient. Or for that matter, to anyone who now acts as a health care decision-maker: patient, clinician, purchaser, vendor. And in that sense, this is a revolutionary development.

 

We'll have a lot more to report after the session, of course. But here's s guess at some of the more exciting aspects of what we might hear.

 

 Imagine that a large corporation could gain access to a steady flow of clinical encounter or claims data for a sizable portion of the care delivered in the US. (Claims data is more likely at this point, but clinical encounter data has more robust clinical information and has more integrity.)  Let's say it could also get hold of lab data, image data and drug data. And let's say that company could assemble the disparate data elements into meaningful individual patient records accessible by any patient who wishes to see this information. This isn't so far fetched. Organizations like Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida and Humana have already created similar approaches through their payer-based patient record system, Availity.

 

Patient records might actually be created in two levels: one for patients and one for clinicians. Privacy and security issues are paramount. Once the patient sets up an account to allow the sponsoring organization (like a Yahoo, Google or Microsoft) to create a record, then any time his/her record is accessed, the patient might be notified, and an audit trail would exist.

 

If the sponsoring corporation has access to continuous rivers of data, it could analyze that information, cutting it in different ways to identify

 

 

The company could make this information available to all users, creating both pricing/performance transparency and accountability, but also creating information that helps patients, clinicians, purchasers and vendors make better decisions.

 

In the long term, new, better information might help all these players make decisions that are based more than ever on data rather than speculation. But in the short term, it would almost certainly help rationalize the tremendous excess that is now destabilizing American health care, driving down cost and helping to re-establish stability and sustainability to the system.

 

These are just a couple issues that will be top of mind at today's meeting. I'm sure there will be more.

 

The innovations we'll hear about may not be here today, but they'll be realities tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. They'll portend tremendous improvements in health care, improving quality and driving down cost, not just for health care professionals, but, more importantly,  for patients.   Health care, an industry rife with excess that derives from misaligned incentives and a lack of transparency, is filled with low hanging fruit. The new tools offered by IT are just now becoming sophisticated enough to bring tremendous value while revolutionizing the way health care works. And that's why their promise is so compelling.

 

Stay tuned.