Health 2.0 keynote recap – #health2con

I’m excited to be attending my first Health 2.0 conference today to learn more about the trends in healthcare innovation and meet the hackers, entrepreneurs, industry and government leaders who are driving disruptive change in the healthcare industry. As a User Experience designer, I’m pleased to see such a focus on patient-centered thinking. Here’s a quick recap and interpretation of the presentations I saw this morning.

The first session was a “dueling keynote,” two short presentations by two interesting speakers

• author, health futurist, and healthcare industry advisor, Jeff Goldsmith.
• publisher, Web 2.0 pundit, and “alpha geek” watcher, Tim O’Reilly

Goldsmith started off by talking about what he called the “Innovation Drop” across every sector of the healthcare industry, from medical devices and imaging technology to enterprise and clinical IT to healthcare delivery. In one example statistic, Pharma R&D spending has tripled while new drug introductions have dropped by 2/3 over the past few years.

After establishing his point about stagnation in the industry, he moved on to talk about the Boomer generation and the increased demand they will bring as they age and require more from the healthcare system. He illustrated he point by comparing the receding waters before a tsunami to the coming en masse retirement of Boomer healthcare practitioners. The tsunami’s wave, in his metaphor, will hit when that same population places unprecedented demand on a diminished healthcare system.

Goldsmith ended by stating that the industry needs to rethink its approach to innovation to increase the productivity of the healthcare system. He offered five calls to action.

• Tame the documentation problem in healthcare delivery
• Help both HCPs and patients find information effortlessly when and where they need it
• Accommodate the increasing diversity of HCP and patient needs and styles
• Equip patients and families with tools to better manage their own health
• Entertain and honor the patient

O’Reilly then launched into a talk on how disruptive innovation from outside the traditional healthcare industry is coming to change the way the healthcare system works. He characterized the trend of Web 2.0 companies as those who were able to weather the doc com bust by being the best in their industries at harvesting collective intelligence. To this he added the components that have come to characterize Web 2.0, a focus on cloud computing, data-driven applications, mobile interfaces, real-time information and pushing the Internet beyond the browser and into everyday objects and interactions.

He used the example of the media industry as a bellwether for what is coming in healthcare, adding the point that many currently successful companies will be usurped by new entrants and many will fail before reliable new business models are established. He offered a vision for the future in three specific technological trends: the introduction of tablet computing to the point of care, cloud-based services to unify and manage patient data, and the emergence of sensor platforms like smartphones and other connected devices to reduce the burden of patient-contributed information.

Finally, O’Reilly ended by telling the audience that to truly capitalize on the principles of Web 2.0 innovators should seek to harness the collective intelligence emerging from the introduction of new technologies and make smart use of the “information shadows” that result from our everyday actions.

In the Q&A that followed the keynotes, Goldsmith and O’Reilly outlined two fundamental challenges to idling the infrastructure on which a new healthcare system could be based:

• harnessing medical data and getting it to the HCPs and patients when and where they need it
• simplifying the transactional complexity of the existing payment system in healthcare and moving from a “pay for procedure” model to a “pay for outcomes” one.