Web 2.0 and Healthcare

The clinical professions are ambivalent at best concerning online consumer health information. The message here is that the horse is out of the barn. It's too easy to create social networking applications that leverage Web 2.0 technologies like wikis, blogs, and podcasts, and exploit their synergies with Web 1.0 technologies like forums and mailing lists, and now with Web 3.0 technologies like Microsoft's HealthVault and the nascent Google Health. These applications will interconnect health information consumers with birds of a feather, but also with commercial entities bent on exploiting the opportunities the social media make possible.

Clinicians can either get on the speeding train now, or get run over. It's probably possible to do both, which is part of their hesitation in making the leap. But the inevitable is, to put it redundantly, inevitable.

Ben Flock, a Microsoft Healthcare & Life Sciences Industry advisor, recently said that Web 2.0 technologies moved information out of isolated silos and into interlinked community computing platforms that function like software for users.

Also Mr. Flock said applying those same concepts to the health care industry would provide tools that would allow for better and more relevant information sharing, collaboration, and ultimately better care as consumers gained more control over their information and, ultimately, their health.

Web 2.0 features like product and service ratings, information search, social communities, and tools are a natural evolution of health care technology, Flock said, and represent a new business paradigm that companies and institutions will have to adopt in order to remain competitive and relevant.

So with Web 2.0 featres like wikis, RSS etc you can monitor your healthcare needs with much more ease and quickly.