Technology leads business models in Health 2.0

reporting live from San Francisco
There’s something of a gold rush atmosphere here at the Health 2.0 conference in San Francisco. Panelists from Google, Yahoo!, WebMD and Microsoft clearly believe there’s gold in them thar hills, but it is equally clear that the business model remains in development.

“The way we at Google look at (health) consumer engagement and using the Internet for discovery and community building — we are still at the start of the arc,” said product marketing manager Missy Krasner.

“The great news is even at the beginning, it’s a great opportunity,” added Microsoft’s corporate VP for Health Solutions, Peter Neupert.

Some quick stats from the big aggregators:
• The search market for health is already estimated to be between $500 million and $1 billion.
• 160 million adults go online to research health-related issues
• Two-thirds of all physicians go online every day for practice-related reasons
• Yahoo! reports 8 million health related searches, 140,000 health-related groups and 13,000 health questions on its Yahoo! Answers service this year
• WedMD has an active user base of 40 million today

The current business model is search-supported advertising. Panelists acknowledged that there are some concerns about the trustworthiness of advertiser-sponsored content, but said that today’s users expect and want advertising as part of the content.

The market will not become transformative, however, until two conditions take hold: data liquidity and the marriage of content and transaction. The first condition describes a state in which data from disparate sources can be integrated into a service that provides users with personalized information. The second refers to the Web 2.0 state in which users can seamlessly move from search to discovery to action.

The panel split on the question of whether current healthcare standards help or hinder data liquidity. Krasner, who formerly worked for the U.S. Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information technology, was blunt: “There are too many healthcare standards.” She said she believed that the movement towards consumerism and retail health will move the industry towards de facto standards that will need to be broadly adopted.

Neupert said that the search for perfection has become the enemy of the good.

“Standards get used when services and software are deployed and people use them,” he said. “The gold standard — perfect semantic interoperability — gets in the way of adoption today.”

by Jack Beaudoin, reporting from San Francisco

Posted by Jack Beaudoin on Thursday, September 20th, 2007 at 1:38 pm
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