Earlier this week, IBM & Google announced a software platform for connecting at-home medical devices automatically to Google Health (Microsoft’s HealthVault has a list of supported devices). ReadWriteWeb and medGadget have great coverage of the announcement. Having a set of open standards for data sharing between health devices is a powerful start to allow people to start to collect, monitor, analyze and act upon their own personal health data. I’ve started thinking more about using data to change behaviour, in particular personal health data to inform and change exercise and health care behaviours. After reading Joshua Rosenthal’s summary of SxSW 2008’s Health 2.0 panels I was hopeful that there would be some coverage in Austin. The current panels and core conversations look like there are 2 sessions including Melanie Rosenthal’s Killing Us Softly: The Failure of Technology in Health Care, John Grohol’s Social Networking in Health: e-Patients, Data & Privacy; Thor Muller’s Welcome to Your Posthuman Future and Keely Kolmes Therapy 2.0: Mental Health for Geeks.
I’m looking forward to learning and discussing patient privacy and cloud storage. Devices and data to modify behaviour. Business models for small care givers. The new found federal support in the US of future health care including education and prevention, along with the systems overhaul are really exciting. Ontario has been on the eHealth bandwagon and published their 2009-2012 eHealth Strategy. There are private-public partnerships like The Centre for eHealth Innovation that should develop a few key local companies and technologies.