Health Care 2.0

submitted by Martin Wasserman:

Modern information technology is having a huge impact on the health industry, enabling patients to have much greater access to information and helping them to be much more active participants in their own health care. It's now possible to get quick information and advice online from your doctor without having to wait for an appointment, and to compare experiences with people who have similar conditions to your own via social networking programs. Also, increased knowledge of genetics is making it possible to tailor medical treatments much more closely to the physiology of the specific patient.

On this month's Future Talk, host Martin Wasserman interviews several people who are directly involved in finding ways to apply modern information resources to improve public health. The in-studio guests are John de Souza, CEO of MedHelp, an online health community with a wide range of services that boasts 12 million unique visitors a month, and Bruce Cohen, CEO of VitaPath Genetics, which does individualized DNA analysis to enable more precisely tailored medical treatments.

Additionally, Future Talk attended the recent Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, where we spoke with several people involved in this rapidly growing field. Karl Ulfers is V.P. of Consumer Solutions at Optum Health, whose products provide better online communications between health care consumers and providers, Brent Poole is CEO of Mindbloom, which seeks to promote mental, physical and spiritual health through a social gaming experience, and Damon Ramsey M.D. is CEO of Healthism, which offers social networking tools aimed at preventive health maintenance.

The message of all of these people seems to be consistent: the more information and access to resources you have, the better you can maintain your own well being. Here are the cable TV Playback times. This episode may not be scheduled just yet.