Technology highlights: Health 2.0 - 2009 (San Francisco)

This year, the Health 2.0 conference 2009, San Francisco takes place at the Design Center Concourse at 635 8th Street (at Brannan). It is an old dark wood train loading station which contrasts interestingly with the image of health care in general where everything is supposed to be bright and clean. The setting is similar to last year with round tables of ten people that facilitates social contacts. On the back of the building on what was the loading platforms are more than 30 exhibitors. This year the crowd is roughly the same size, between 950 to 1000 people (got these numbers from Matthew and Indu). The conference was well organized as usual, expect the wireless connections that were very poor!

The focus of this year is the platforms for mixing and aggregating data, applications services and channels, including mobile devices, social networks , widgets and portal applications.

8:30am - Introduction by Matthew Holt and Indu Subaiya

In the past, health 2.0 was essentially about user generated health care, then the issue of connecting to providers started to be important. More recently the partnerships to reform delivery was the focus. This year, as data drives decisions and discovery, tools and platforms seems to take more and more importance .

8:50am - Keynotes by Aneesh Chopra, Assistant to the President Obama & CTO, Office of Science & Technology Science.

Building blocks of innovation: the US need a more modern and secure infrastructure
How do we control costs?
How to ensure that we have the skills professionals?
The synergy of innovation between health care and energy, IT, green technology
Promotion of enterprise creation since this is where the growth of productivity comes from
Help promote public data sets (e.g. CMS, VA) as soon as possible
Promotes innovations in various areas including mobile

9:15am - Panel Clinical Groupware and the Next Generation of Clinician-Patient Interaction Tools.

Clinical Groupware is the next generation of EHR
Panel includes people from Myca, American Well, RMD Networks (showing reachmydoctor.com), Vision Tree Software, Relay Health.
A lot of demos focus on the communication aspect between patients and physicians.
Payment reform is needed to promote these types of tools

9:50am - Adoption of Health 2.0 Platforms by Physicians on Main Street

The bottom line is culture change for technology and tools adoption.

11:15am - Payers and Health 2.0

Anvita : clinical Analytical tool data analysis
Health Innovations - Focus is now to reduce cost from Ambulatory care, ER, CT, MRI etc.
Blue Cross Blue Shield (BCBS)
Cigna (8.5M customers in USA, 41M worlkdwide). Presence on Facebook, partnership with Intuit.
State of Minnesota Management & Budget
Kaiser Permanente - (8.5M users, 10 states esp CA) - Focus on chronic care management.

Including demos from:

Adam Lee - Intuit (Health Expense tracker, claim assistant) - Very intuitive tools! available to 27M users by the end of the year! Partners with Cigna, United HealthCare, Medical Mutual. ***
Fred Goldstein - US Preventive Medecine (thepreventionplan.com)
Karl Ulfers - Optum Health HealthWorldWeb
Daniel Kogan - HealthWorldWeb

12:00pm - Doctor Office special showcase demos

The doctor channel (partner with publishers, lots of channels, videos, documentaries ..). Not clear what is the business model (compete with Youtube?). Should be part of a PHR.
rxvantage (For providers Office tools, alerts, scheduling ) - Started in RI -
Practicefusion (Web based PHR/EMR - on the Cloud for patient. Has a professional view - including scheduling). Based on Saleforce. Contains adds that can be removed for $100/month. The data does not belong to the patient.
BoundaryMedical (Tool and framework, provider and patient portals - give the ability to create a product/project in less than 30 mn)
Phreesia (streamline billing and payments - integrated with EMRs - for patient and providers) ***
MdDigest - (Opens source platform and solutions for patient and physicians - .net based) - (e.g. Healthforge practice monitor)
Spinal Disorders Registry - based on Microsoft HealthVault, integrate with Cisco video and Webex conference system - 50K patients - Seems a specific feature of an EMR
Ozmosis - Tools such as Health Alerts (partner with Veratect)
Phytel (Patient registry, reporting and analytics) -
Doctations (Interoperability platform and tools? 3 tiers: Free, $33/mo, $1033/mo) - 22 partners
Dr Chrono (Pratice Management + notifications reminder through voice over IP, IM etc) offer an App Store.