Marty Tenenbaum’s vision for an accelerator for Health2.0
At the end of Health2.0 Conference Marty Tenenbaum
asked if there was interest in forming a group to accelerate Health2.0.
Earlier this was written up on THCB as though it was another standards
group. But that’s not entirely what Marty meant. He explains here:
I’m eager to follow up on the creation of an industry
initiative to accelerate the Health 2.0 vision. This organization would
do for ehealth what CommerceNet did for ecommerce by catalyzing the
market. The Blog posting focused on standards. While standards are
important, so is evangelism, business development, lobbying, and
especially visionary integration projects that demonstrate the
potential of Health 2.0 for improving people’s lives.
Early CommerceNet members included startups like Netscape,
Yahoo, and Amazon as well as established organizations like
Visa/Mastercard, FedEx and IBM. The members of CommerceNet collaborated
on initiatives like search, catalogs, security, payment, and
shipping/fulfillment, leading to complete end-end transactions where
one could actually locate a product, buy it, pay for it and get it
delivered. Not only was overall market growth accelerated; many
business deals resulted, generating a lot of wealth.
The parallels with Health 2.0 are obvious. Like the days
of ecommerce, many energetic entrepreneurs are exploring the seemingly
limitless opportunities and obstacles of a huge and important market.
Each provides useful but highly fragmented data or services (e.g.,PHRs,
search, patient and doctor communities). Aggregating data across
communities and integrating services into complete solutions (e.g.,
selecting the best treatment or physician for you) is much more
valuable to consumers and essential if we’re actually going to impact
healthcare in meaningful ways.
Everyone interested should move on this as soon as possible to capitalize on the momentum of the amazing conference.
To get involved, you can email [email protected] and of course comment here.
Health 2.0 Developer Challenges