Saturday, October 11, 2008

Health 2.0: Stay Focused on the Goals

Ben Heywood, co-founder of PatientsLikeMe, outlines simple (but difficult) goals that those in the health 2.0 space must accomplish. Based on his post I take it that he highlighted these during his keynote address at the second Health 2.0 Northeast conference.

His simple but eloquent message to the health 2.0 community:
I believe we, as the eHealth community, need to focus on two major goals: 1) solve patients’ problems, and 2) create business models that allow us to do #1.
Successful companies must show real and tangible benefits directly to the patient consumer. As one who regularly participates in the health information discussion and debate as West Virginia moves forward with its health information network infrastructure -- I often try to step back and ask, like Mr. Heywood, the simple question, "does this help the patient -- why and how?"

To be disruptive and successful the current crop of creative companies have to show a direct and immediate impact on improving care and quality linked to a reduction in cost or a value proposition that the increase in cost is worth such expenditure.

1 comment:

Lee Kraus said...

Bob,

I listened to this podcast on the way home tonight and I thought you might want to listen to it.

http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail4118.html

I was really struck by the idea that if they could capture just 1% of a population of people with a certain disease, that would be way more information then currently available in aggregate on most diseases. I also like their approach to letting the data drive what they are learning and how they look at ideas. This is a great model for other domains.