Rock ‘n roll at Health 2.0

Live from the Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco
There’s a bit of a glam, almost hipster, feel to the Health 2.0 Conference. Camp music from 1980s sitcoms and movies, a slick and self-congratulatory video introduction that would have made Steve Jobs blush, and a lot of sport jacket-and-black t-shirt combinations.

It would not be unfair to liken the Health 2.0 cottage industry to the nascent days of Silicon Valley – except that there’s a widespread acknowledgment that no matter how great your technology, you need to have a community, and you need to have a business model.
That’s not surprising. Most of the people here are either veterans of the first wave of technology companies, or of enterprise-facing companies (like Joseph Villa, formerly at Accenture, now COO of the employer division of Revolution Health, or Jeff Rideout, formerly of Cisco, now at Ziegler HealthVest Fund). They know that the greatest ideas in the business world have no cash value without, er, cash value. That is, if not an immediate revenue stream, at least a plan to monetize the idea.

What attracts them, I think, is the excitement that is palpable in the air.

One flavor of that excitement comes from the uncertainty of the venture and the nimbleness of the companies they are now with. The other flavor is the idea — best encapsulated in the name Steve Case chose for his new Health 2.0 business — that revolution is in the air. Many of the panelists who presented today offered a hierarchy of goals, that began with offering consumers new tools to manage their own healthcare and health finances, and ended with transforming the way healthcare is delivered.

Many of the entrepreneurs and technologists on the dais spoke about the need to rearrange the traditional roles we’ve come to expect in healthcare. Scott Schreeve, formerly of Medsphere, told the audience that doctors would move from demigods to trusted advisories, consumers would move from passive patients to active participants in health decisions and payers would move from adversaries to advocates.

That might be asking a little much. As I noted in a previous post, David Brailer, MD, the former U.S. Health IT czar, said he too believed a transformation of healthcare is underway, but said we wouldn’t see the fruits of that change in the era of Health 2.0. Rather, he said, we’d have to wait until Health 3.0 or 4.0.

Still, the enthusiasm is contagious. Or maybe it’s just all that talk about viral networking that’s getting to me. But I will say that the spirit of Health 2.0 is exciting, and reminds me of why I was attracted to the healthcare IT industry in the first place. The possibility of being a lever of change, of being able to put your heart into your job, is intoxicating and thrilling.
by Jack Beaudoin, reporting live from San Francisco

Posted by Jack Beaudoin on Thursday, September 20th, 2007 at 6:13 pm
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