Welcome to Day 2 of the Health 2.0 conference. There was an interesting talk this morning focused on "Consumer Aggregators", which demoed new applications from WebMD, Google Health, and Microsoft Heath Vault.
Read MoreThe morning session focused on clinician-patient interactions. Executives from Myca, VisionTree, AmericanWell, and ReachMyDoctor, presented their virtual doctors' office visit tools. All of the tools had similar features, such as online scheduling, and the choice of different types of offices visits, such as IM chat or video. Most integrated well with personal health records, so that during an office visit, the physician had access to the patient's medication refill history, or overdue routine preventive medical tests, such as blood-work, prostate screens, or mammograms.
Read MoreThe ideas behind The Decision Tree, in a sense, focus on ways to create the next-generation patient. This new kind of patient will have to understand the context of their own medical self through a combination of genetics, personal metrics/data, and statistics. Needless to say, understanding one's own medical self will also require an increased medical literacy, where patients understand both their conditions, as well as where they fall within the spectrum of their disease.
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