The closing keynote at Microsoft's Health & Life Sciences Developer and Solutions Conference, held April 22 through 24 in Atlantic City, N.J., got a write-up in eWeek: Web 2.0 Can Give Consumers More Control over Health Care.
Ben Flock, a Microsoft Healthcare & Life Sciences Industry advisor, told attendees during his closing keynote... that Web 2.0 technologies moved information out of isolated silos and into interlinked community computing platforms that function like software for users.
Flock said applying those same concepts to the health care industry would provide tools that would allow for better and more relevant information sharing, collaboration, and ultimately better care as consumers gained more control over their information and, ultimately, their health.
Web 2.0 features like product and service ratings, information search, social communities, and tools are a natural evolution of health care technology, Flock said, and represent a new business paradigm that companies and institutions will have to adopt in order to remain competitive and relevant.
"The social relevance factor is a moving target, especially in health care, because it's in such an early stage," Flock said. The key is successfully reaching out to partners, customers and consumers, he said, and Flock cited HealthVault as one way Microsoft was reaching health care consumers.
The clinical professions are ambivalent at best concerning online consumer health information. The message here is that the horse is out of the barn. It's too easy to create social networking applications that leverage Web 2.0 technologies like wikis, blogs, and podcasts, and exploit their synergies with Web 1.0 technologies like forums and mailing lists, and now with Web 3.0 technologies like Microsoft's HealthVault and the nascent Google Health. These applications will interconnect health information consumers with birds of a feather, but also with commercial entities bent on exploiting the opportunities the social media make possible.
Clinicians can either get on the speeding train now, or get run over. It's probably possible to do both, which is part of their hesitation in making the leap. But the inevitable is, to put it redundantly, inevitable.
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