Tech Medicine Links for 10.23.8

More updates from the Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco from the Health Care Blog: health management tools for consumers, an interview with the CEO of HealthGrades, and Sermo's new partnership with Bloomberg.

Microsoft's HealthBlog asks, "Health 2.0 — what are we really building?"

As I write this piece looking out the 19th floor window of my room at the W Hotel, a large yellow constructions crane interrupts my view of the Bay Bridge, water and mountains beyond. It strikes me as the perfect metaphor for Health 2.0.; It is rising up all around us, but where is all this technology taking us? Are patients better served and is care
being improved because of health-specific search engines, patient and disease social networking, on-line personal health records, and retail genetic testing? Or is the plethora of health information that is now available to patients only frustrating them because the health delivery system and their personal physicians are so unprepared to deal with it? How will an industry being rattled by shortages of skilled labor and a burgeoning populating of aging patients with chronic diseasesrespond to an ever-increasing demand for services? It certainly won't
be able to respond using the work-flow and business models of the past. Telling patients they must make a phone call, book an appointment, drive across town, wait in a waiting room, and wait again in an exam room for 5-10 minutes with their doctor just won't cut it anymore. And yet, if we don't make changes to a reimbursement systems that only pays doctors for seeing patients one on one in an exam room somewhere, how can we expect the health delivery system to incorporate and embrace new models of care?

The Ozmosis blog reviews the first day of the conference.

West Shell, CEO of Healthline, had a nice demo of his health search site - he talked about their
intelligent ad targeting and how they have built a taxonomy to make the
ads more contextually relevant - When searching for "AAA" on a health
site, think "Abdominal Aortic Aneurism," not flat tires.

Dr. Ted Eytan has some photos of the conference.

Turning our attention away from Health 2.0 for a moment: the Bioethics Blog discusses sending anonymous STD notification greeting cards by email. The website is inSPOT. (It's a great idea — but how long until the idea is co-opted by malicious spam?)

And finally, the book of joe passes along this quote from a paper from the Archives of Surgery:

More of the public (57.4%) than the [medical trauma] professionals (19.5%) believe that divine intervention could save a person when physicians believe treatment is futile.

Tech Medicine Links is a collection of selected developments in the worlds of technology and health care. Have a suggestion? Please email efficientmd@gmail.com.