And coming soon is the latest opportunity to showcase and learn about many of those innovations: the 2012 Health Data Initiative Forum– aka the Health Datapalooza — being held in DC at the Washington Convention Center on June 5-6, 2012.

For all of you who have been creating value from health and health care data – this is your opportunity to showcase your brilliance for the nation to see!  Led by the amazingly talented folks at Health 2.0, the Health Data Consortium is sponsoring a national competition for the best new apps and services created using health and health care-related data.  Entry applications for the competition are due March 30^th.

Innovators will then go through an “American Idol”-style process in which panels of consumers, health care professionals, and community leaders will judge innovations submitted. The innovations that best demonstrate benefit and value for health and care improvement will be featured and demoed at the June Datapalooza.

So if you’ve built or are building something terrific with the aid of health data, throw your hat into the ring! Submit your entry form by March 30^th, and may the best innovations win!

Todd Park is the CTO of HHS and has just been appointed CTO of the Federal Government

(Full disclosure: as is obvious from the article Health 2.0 is involved as a sub-contractor helping with Health Datapalooza 2012)

Later PHRs tried to overcome these problems by making it easier to import data from other systems (think geting your drug data from Walgreens) and linking to other reference databases (so that when you enter a drug name the right spelling comes up and it can tell you about interactions, etc).

There was (and still is) the problem of how to get paper documents into the record. MyMedicalRecords.com allows you to fax in paper records to make PDFs, and has burned through some $30m in 5 years (and I was pretty cynical about them from the start). Of course even getting much of this right didn’t help many early PHRs like WellMed which went through some $40m before being sold to WebMD for $20m and iMetrikus (now Numera) which spent some $75m (est) of Chiron Founder William Rutter’s money before completely changing models.

CareZone is the product of ex-Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz’s last two years since the fire-sale to Oracle. It was introduced to an adoring bunch of journalists yesterday including Techcrunch’s Eric Eldon, Robert Scoble, and Xconomy’s Wade Roush. All of them continue to confirm to me that they don’t much understand this market and they fawn over former techies who think that they’ve discovered health care nirvana. I really cannot see what the fuss is about. They’re all fascinated by the fact that this doesnt link to Facebook and somehow keeping instructions to take Johnny to the doctor off the Twitter feed is a huge advance. But none of them see the really basic flaws in CareZone or seem to have any history of what’s happened in this market before.

Given that I make my living promoting new health technology companies, it pains me to have to poke holes, but as far as I can see CareZone–which is marketed as a site that allows a small group of caregivers to manage their family’s care–is basically a 1999 PHR mixed with a to-do list, much like RallyRound (from the UK) or LottsaHelpingHands.

Worse, those advances of recent PHRs–including importing conditions, documents, medical records, drug lists, from other systems–are absent. Sure you can upload a PDF of a living will to CareZone–but you could do that on Google Health. And on Google Health you could also automatically import your drugs from Walgreens & CVS, as you can on HealthVault. On CareZone you have to type them in as text–there’s not even a drug database to link to behind the scenes to make sure you spelled it right. I literally typed in “Bullshit” and it’s now one of my daughter’s medications! (Click on the picture above) Even MotherKnows has a process to get your kids’ records in from the doctor. And what about the ability to bring in a BlueButton file, now available to millions of Veterans and seniors? RelayHealth and many others now allow that. Not on Carezone.

Sure, Carezone adds a to-do list and a Facebook style comment feed to communicate with other caregivers–but Dossia has that and lots lots more. And it’s simple for other records companies to add those Facebook/Basecamp features that the tech journos are so excited about–but harder for CareZone to build the links that will make this a useful service.

And did I mention that almost all those services, most of which weren’t successful, were free and CareZone wants over $150 a year?

Maybe there’s something more there to this. Who knows?  It may be a matter of timing. After all Yelp was more or less Epinions redux but people were used to commenting Web 2.0 style in 2005, not in 2000. Maybe a to-do list and a calendar are all caregivers want, even if Google provides them for free. But CareZone will have to react very quickly to add ease of use features and connectivity to other data sources.

And I really hope I’m wrong. Caregivers need all the help they can get, and there is by no means a dominant service in the “support the caregiver information process” space yet. But I fear this is one more example of another techie lost in healthcareland.

Blueprint Health is a specialist health IT incubator that just opened its doors this week and selected its first group of startups who get $20K each and a chance to hang in a nice art gallery in Soho that’s opening officially Thursday (FD Health 2.0′s NY city team will be moving in too). You can read more at Techcrunch and see the HUGE list of mentors here (I was thinking of throwing my hat in the ring until they told me it involved work!). But I wanted to ask Brad Weinberg & Mat Farkash, the founders, what was so special about Blueprint, so Mat told me:

Matthew H: Describe the Blueprint program

Mat Farkash: Blueprint Health is a New York based health-focused accelerator that is a Charter member of the TechStars Network.  Blueprint Health kicked off its three-monthWinter program on January 9 in its 12,000 square foot office in SoHo and will also host a summer program in 2012.  The program is a heavily mentorship focused, providing teams with access to over 120 mentors, all of whom have experience in the healthcare industry, including many physicians and health providers.  The program’s mentor community include founders and/or executives from Aetna, Allscripts, Amicas, Cerner, CVS, Eliza, Everyday Health, Johns Hopkins, Generation Health, Healthination, HelloHealth, Johnson & Johnson, Keas, Kryuus, Livestrong, McKinsey Hospital Institute, MedCommons, Medivo, Montefiore Hospital, New York Presbyterian Hospital, PatientsLikeMe, Premera, Pfizer, Phreesia, ShapeUp, Take Care Health Systems, Teladoc, Verizon, and WebMD.  The mentor community also includes investment professionals from Aberdare Ventures, ATV, Bessemer Venture Partners, Edison Ventures, FirstMark Capital, Google Ventures, Highland Capital Partners, HLM Venture Partners, Milestone Venture Partners, Physic Ventures, Psilos, Radius Ventures, Union Square Ventures, and Windham Venture Partners. The program’s sponsors include California Health Care Foundation, Ernst & Young, Goodwin Proctor, and Rackspace.

Matthew H: Since 2007 we’ve had nearly 1,000 companies apply to show at Health 2.0 in every conceivable category of health IT, yet many would argue that health care isn’t receptive to their products & services.  Do we really need more start-ups?

Mat Farkash: The genesis of Blueprint Health came from discussions we had with founders that had participated in other accelerators, experienced the difficulties you described and wanted mentorship from people with expertise in the healthcare industry.  It is incredibly important that entrepreneurs understand the healthcare industry and its workflows and payment models if they want to create a sustainable businesses.  Unlike many other industries, the payer in the health industry is most often a business (a hospital, health insurance company, pharmacy, doctor).  Therefore, most companies in the health industry not only need to understand what end-users want, but also understand the needs and nuances of large organizations.  Blueprint Health provides access to over 120 mentors with this expertise so that teams come out of our program understanding the industry players and what types of innovations not only will improve patient engagement and outcomes, but also will get adopted and have a sustainable business model.

Matthew H: OK, not sure you told me why we need more startups but appreciate the focus on the business model. However, there’s already two other well publicized health care IT startup incubators (RockHealth/Healthbox) up and running, plus at least one under the radar (RemedyVentures), plus the more amorphous StartUpHealth (based like you in New York City). What’s different about Blueprint?

Mat Farkash: New York is the best city in the world to start a healthcare company in right now.  It has a great ecosystem of thriving healthcare companies from ZocDoc to WebMD, incredible hospitals including New York Presbyterian and Montefiore, the most doctors of any city in the U.S., and an entrepreneurially supportive government lead by mayor Bloomberg.  Blueprint Health has the largest network of mentors with expertise in the healthcare industry and the only accelerator in the TechStars network that is focused on the healthcare industry.  It is also the only health centric accelerator with a founder that is a physician and a founder that has started a successful company in the healthcare space that works with companies like Aetna, United Health Group, Hewlett Packard, and General Electric.  All three accelerators where founded around the same time (Blueprint Health was started in mid-2010).  Blueprint Health has purposely spent the last year building a world-class network of mentors so that teams have an incredible of bench of talent they can lean on.  We are very supportive of what Healthbox and RockHealth are doing and have expressed a desire to collaborate with them (a rising tide…)

So what is Missy actually going to do? I had the good sense to ask her and she had perhaps less sense in telling me in quite some detail:

During my 5 years at Google on Google Health, we met with alot of innovative healthcare startups who came in and pitched their solutions as possible integration partners or acquisition targets.  There is still so much out there that has not be adequately addressed: end-of-life documentation, personalized health and provider search, big data and analytics, patient/provider communications via ACO trends,  transparency solutions for benefit design and EBOs, patient UGC and the social web, cheaper and better reimbursable telemedicine, and on and on. With all the innovation coming out of the various health IT accelerators and government app challenges, it’s a great time to align with a seasoned venture firm and take a deeper look at what is really ripe to become a market disrupter.  Morgenthaler has a long standing reputation on Sand Hill Road for their  40 years of investing in both IT and Life Sciences.  In the past few years, they have become very known for their DC to VC health IT startup showcase and current health IT investments, like Practice Fusion. I will be working with Rebecca Lynn and other senior partners to help broaden their health IT investing strategy, source new investments, perform due diligence and advise portfolio companies.  This kind of role will put my past Google Health and ONC experience to good use.

I think all the start-ups in Health 2.0 have a new friend–or an old friend with new power–to talk with and (this is the “less sense” part) I expect Missy’s email box to get very full, very quickly!

PS The magician/mentalist at the party was the best I’ve ever seen. He asked 6 of us for a number each and produced a lottery ticket with those numbers on it….and several other unbelievable tricks. Hopefully someone will tell me his name.

Diversinet is a tech company focused squarely on securing the communications of health data between multiple devices. I caught up with Mark Trigsted, Executive VP, Global Healthcare at Diversinet who told me about what they’re now doing with both the DOD and the private sector.

No news on the price or other aspects of the deal, or indeed why Aetna has kept it under wraps for so long. However, CEO Mark Bertolini’s team is convinced that the future is consumers mediated by employers choosing between ACO-like organizations–and they want to be providing services for every part of that. You can click ahead to slide 12 in the embedded deck below to see more on the iTriage role in Aetna’s strategy, but it’s clear that Aetna liked iTriage for its 3 million downloads and increasing functionality, which we featured at Health 2.0 back in 2010 and also wrote about on Health 2.0 News in August. This continues a trend we’ve long forecast of Health 2.0 technologies being embedded in the strategies of large health care organizations.

Once again, this Thanksgiving we are grateful to all the people who keep this mission alive day after day: to ensure that each and every one of us understands, communicates, and has honored their end of life wishes.

Seems almost more fitting than usual this year, the year of making change happen. 2011 gave us the Arab Spring, people on the ground using social media to organize a real political revolution. And now, love it or hate it – it’s the Occupy Wall Street movement that’s got people talking.

Smart people (like our good friend Susannah Fox have made the point that unlike those political and economic movements, our mission isn’t an issue we need to raise our fists about – it’s an issue we have the luxury of being able to hold hands about.

It’s a mission that’s driven by all the personal stories we’ve heard of people who’ve seen their loved ones suffer unnecessarily at the end of their lives.

It’s driven by that ripping-off-the-band-aid feeling of relief you get when you’ve finally broached the subject of end of life wishes with your family, free from the burden of just not knowing what they’d want for themselves, and knowing you could advocate for these wishes if your loved one weren’t able to speak up for themselves.

And it’s driven by knowing that this is a conversation that needs to happen early, and often. One of the greatest gifts you can give the ones you love is making sure you’re all on the same page. In the words of the amazing Atul Gawande, you only die once! Die the way you want. Make sure your loved ones get that same gift. And there is a way to engage in this topic with grace!

Here are the five questions, read them, consider them, answer them (you can securely save your answers at the Engage with Grace site), share your answers with your loved ones. It doesn’t matter what your answers are, it just matters that you know them for yourself, and for your loved ones. And they for you.

We all know the power of a group that decides to assemble. In fact, we recently spent an amazing couple days with the members of the Coalition to Transform Advanced Care, or C-TAC, working together to channel so much of the extraordinary work that organizations are already doing to improve the quality of care for our country’s sickest and most vulnerable.

Noted journalist Eleanor Clift gave an amazing talk, finding a way to weave humor and joy into her telling of the story she shared in this Health Affairs article. She elegantly sums up (as only she can) the reason that we have this blog rally every year:

For too many physicians, that conversation is hard to have, and families, too, are reluctant to initiate a discussion about what Mom or Dad might want until they’re in a crisis, which isn’t the best time to make these kinds of decisions. Ideally, that conversation should begin at the kitchen table with family members, rather than in a doctor’s office.

It’s a conversation you need to have wherever and whenever you can, and the more people you can rope into it, the better! Make this conversation a part of your Thanksgiving weekend, there will be a right moment, you just might not realize how right it was until you begin the conversation.

This is a time to be inspired, informed – to tackle our challenges in real, substantive, and scalable ways. Participating in this blog rally is just one small, yet huge, way that we can each keep that fire burning in our bellies, long after the turkey dinner is gone.

Wishing you and yours a happy and healthy holiday season. Let’s Engage with Grace together.

To learn more please go to engagewithgrace.org.This post was developed by Alexandra Drane and the Engage With Grace team.

Today two winners were announced on the White House Blog by HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and in a conference call hosted by Aneesh Chopra (Federal CTO) and Todd Park (CTO, HHS) and some fellow called Joe Biden was there too!

OnWatch is a phone based app that has a series of alarms and prompts built in. For example, it can be set with a message sent to friends saying “I went to a party at XYZ dorm, if I don’t come back by midnight come find me” or it has a panic button that calls 911 or the campus police.

The other winner is called Circle of 6 and it comes from the team at ISIS. (FD I’m on the board of ISIS but I didn’t even know they’d entered the contest!). Circle of 6 puts you in touch with 6 of your closest friends and asks them to come help you if you’re in trouble. It even plugs in the coordinates for them. The ISIS team intends to build out Circle of 6 which is currently an iPhone only prototype.

There were more than 33 entries for Apps Against Abuse, even though there was no prize money at stake. It’s good to see that such commonsense use of these new technologies is finding so many spirited innovators willing to help.

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

Below (in alphabetical order) for the first time, we’re thrilled to announce the Launch! finalists for 2011:

• Basis–There’s been lots of excitement in the Health 2.0 offices about getting hold of one of these devices. It looks like a watch but it tracks heart rate more than time. CEO Jef Holove will finally show us what they’re like.
• Clarimed–CEO Nora Iluri will show us her ambitious attempt to measure devices and much more in health care and communicate the results to lots of constituencies including consumers
• CareCoach–Almost everything we hear in a doctors office is lost by the time we get to the parking lot. But a visit to the doctor is an expensive and important time that should be captured, reviewed and shared with family. CEO Jeff Kozloff shows how CareCoach does that.
• GLU–Janak Joshi is  Executive Director of the TD1 Exchange, funded by the Helmsley Foundation to improved the lives of those with Type 1 Diabetes. TD1 has had a tissue bank up for nearly a year, but this is the first glimpse of their really exciting linked social network, GLU
• GoodRx–CEO Doug Hirsch is a Health 2.0 veteran, and founded DailyStrength.org. Now he’s back with GoodRx which has a simple to say but hard to achieve mission. How do you find the best price on drugs?
• HealthPer–Is there room for another wellness and health promotion company aimed at improving employees’ health engagement and productivity using techniques from gaming? Founder Amit Gupta & COO John Hammitt think that there is if you do it better. HealthPer is the result.
• Medify–Medify re-imagines the health search engine for consumers and wraps a health community around it. CEO Derek Streat founded it following struggles finding information about his daughter’s illness.
• Numera Social–We’ve shown health apps on Facebook before but Numera Social (a sister company to Numera, the former iMetrikus) may be the most aggressive attempt yet to use Facebook as a social health management platform. Melissa Crounse, Director, Content Business Development is our guide. Can health really work on Facebook? We hear it‘s big for games involving sheep!
• 1 + 1 Labs–Wired’s Thomas Goetz wrote an article last year about producing more useful lab information and one this year about Feedback loops. Now he has a new company which combines both.
• WellnessFX–In the 1990s Jim Kean’s Sapient Health Networks was one of the first acquisitions for WebMD. Jim’s big bet is that the future of health is personalized testing and treatment, WellnessFX is his play to bring that to the masses.