The World Wide World: IT Ain't Just the Web ... - Cdn.oreilly.com

PANEL – Health Care: No Patient Left Behind?
Everyone agrees that US health care – both as a market and as a social service – is a
mess. Many of the problems are clear, but they’re all inter-related. We can’t – as a nation
– agree on who should pay for health care, and many players are waiting for some such
consensus to start fixing their own problems. Yet one way or another the focus will
change from paying for care to paying for health, everyone agrees. IT will play an
important role in that transformation: It will help us monitor health, deliver care, and
assess risks and results. Meanwhile, individuals will become more active in managing
their own health, assisted by personal health records and related tools and applications.
(You can read about all this at length in the January 2005 issue of Release 1.0, which
also covers ActiveHealth in greater depth, and mentions the work of the Markle
Foundation and IBM’s health care group.)
When will this happen? It is increasingly apparent that sick people, beleaguered employers,
aging baby boomers and even medical professionals themselves are tired of waiting.
Some people are even starting to address the problems without waiting for a general solution,
hoping they can get others to join in or get out of the way.
Specifically, Carol Diamond leads Markle’s Connecting for Health Initiative, an activist
collection of health-care organizations (private and public) working to foster a betterconnected
and more interoperable health-care system. Its members include IBM, represented
here by Carol Kovac, which generates $1.25 billion in revenues from the sector
and is pushing actively to get its clients to automate clinical as well as financial processes.
Lonny Reisman’s ActiveHealth Management is not waiting for data interoperability
to aggregate individuals’ data (with permission), de facto reverse-engineering mostly
financial data to figure out their conditions and send alerts to their physicians when
some transaction – such as the purchase of a contraindicated drug – triggers an alert.
But in an ideal world, ActiveHealth would have access (with permission) to clinical as
well as transaction data. And it should have more competition! This kind of capability
should be widespread.
In a complementary business, Dawn Lepore at drugstore.com is exploring what it will
mean when more and more consumers start purchasing their drugs online and looking
for more personalized health-care information in that context. Finally, Larry Augustin
recently took over as CEO at Medsphere with the mission to commercialize its opensource
clinical information system and roll it out to the thousands of community hospitals
who could make good use of it. Other health-care companies represented at the
Forum include Epocrates (PAGE 66), Medstory (PAGE 50) and NetMesh (PAGE 35).
20 RELEASE 1.0 WWW.RELEASE1-0.COM