On the down side the AT&T Wi-Fi is unusable. Thankfully my iPhone (2G) works and I can use my other phone as a 3G modem to get online. Posterous has been invaluable as a tool to write emails and get them posted to my blog.
The consensus is that tools for real patient engagement are still three years away but for the Payers that means we have to start planning to integrate these tools now.
The Health 2.0 Accelerator is a glimmer of light in all this. The members are working together, all be it slowly, to use open interfaces and apis. This is what we need if we are to follow the mantra of "use simple tools to do great things."
To move the needle on Patient engagement and empowerment we need to make it easy for the Patient to record their Observations of Daily Living and get those in to a portable personal health record. The next step is then to get the Phyicians to accept our content as VALID information.
I have said many times. The trend from 15 inaccurate readings taken by the patient are infinitely more valuable than one or two readings accurately taken by a health professional under stressful conditions for the patient. The Health Care industry needs to recognize that. Doing so will help us break the Catch-22 situation we are in. One fear seems to be that patients may "lie" in reporting the facts or readings. I firmly believe that the more times data is recorded the harder it becomes to fake the results. Therefore, if it is easy to collect user measured data the more data points will be collected and the more valuable the data becomes.
This conference has also confirmed the value of HealthCamp. On a number of occasions the message has come down from the Health 2.0 Conference stage that we need to get the conversation going between doctors, patients, payers, institutions, government and developers. That is exactly the purpose of HealthCamp. HealthCamp is designed to do that. It is a catalyst for ideas that can be incubated in the Health 2.0 Accelerator and then launched to the world via the Health 2.0 Conference.
