Web 2.0 is coming soon to consumer medical information services, says Gordon Gould. He
reckons the most interesting apps won’t come from established Web medical players, like
WebMD, but rather from startups. Gordon thinks the
established companies are too Web 1.0 – “monolithic, closed, and mostly just about
info-retrieval”.
WebMD’s
mission seems to be to help “navigate the complexity of the healthcare system” and so
it necessarily has a broad reach – from doctors to patients to providers. So perhaps
Gordon is right and innovation will come from presumably more focused and agile
Healthcare startups.
Rajesh Jain
from Emergic has a similar post about IT in the Healthcare system. He quotes from an
article in The
Economist, which says the healthcare industry must get patient information “out of
paper files and into electronic databases” and make it interoperable. But more than that,
decision-making should be moved to the edges of the network (i.e. “by patients in
consultation with their doctors”) and not centralised.
The Economist’s conclusion is similar to Gordon’s – the goal is ultimately “to
enable individuals, at last, to have access to, and possession of, information about
their own health.”
