Health 2.0 Europe-the view from “hip” Berlin

It’s morning on Day 2 of Health 2.0 Europe. We’re at the on the campus of Charité Hospital and University of Medecine (in the old East Berlin) in the Langenbeck-Virchow Building which is now a conference center for medical societies but apparently was used as a part of the old GDR parliament before 1989.

Yesterday, we had a series of intense panel discussions, not least between the German members of the panel who were discussing (and disagreeing) on whether Health 2.0 tools could come “bottom up” or would have to fit in the rather slow creation of national electronic infrastructure for clinical care.

We also had the youngest ever demoer at Health 2.0 Anna Gyramati who somewhat stole the show with her presentation of the Hungarian teen health site which she edits KamaszPanasz.

This morning Neils Boye, a recovering Danish endocrinologist, spent a little time hammering on both Simon Brownleader from HealthLoop and Matt Evans from HealthUnlocked on where the data from their system goes. These are both very cool systems being used by UK based doctors to follow up with patients. We think they’re huge (if early) advances on the current poor follow up that happens with patients. Matt suggested that the wider data infrastructure will emerge, and the question is where the data will be stored and how it’ll be used for research. Joris Molenaar from IPPZ talked about the failure of the national EMR system in the Netherlands, but also suggested that the institutional emergence of such a data infrastructure will come, despite national EMR failures and we’ll see the information in these systems used for other Big data purposes

We also saw real online care from DrED, which has for the last 6 weeks being delivering online prescriptions, and also iDoc24 which allows iPhone based photos of skin conditions to be sent to a network of doctors for a (paid) informational consult–probably the technically coolest demo of the conference so far. And then we heard from American Well, the grandaddy of Health 2.0 online care (if we can say something about a system that’s only 3 years old). CEO Roy Schoenberg explained both how the online care system works, how its spreading in the US, and now how it’s moving to Australia and New Zealand–and how he’s looking for partners in Europe.

More to come with a thrilling Launch! session and more