I was quite privileged to talk to the leaders of Health 2.0, Dr. Indu Subaiya and Matthew Holt, in the busy days after their announced merger with HIMSS. I was revving to talk to them because the Health 2.0 events I have attended have always been stimulating and challenging. I wanted to make sure that after their incorporation into the HIMSS empire they would continue to push clinicians as well as technologists to re-evaluate their workflows, goals, and philosophies.
I’m not sure there is such a thing as a typical Health 2.0 event, but I generally see in such events a twofold mission. Sometimes they orient technologists to consider the needs of doctors and patients (as at a developer challenge). Other times they orient clinicians and health care institutions to consider the changes in goals and means that technology requires, as well as the strains caused by its adoption (as in a HxRefactored conference). Both of these activities disturb the cozy status quo in health IT, prodding its practitioners to try out new forms of research, design, and interaction. Health 2.0 was also happy to publish my own articles trying to untangle the standard confusion around health care.
For HIMSS, absorbing Health 2.0 is about as consequential as an ocean liner picking up a band of performing musicians along its ports of call. For Health 2.0, the impact could be much larger. Certainly, they gain the stability, funding opportunities, and administrative support that typically come with incorporation into a large, established institution. But can they keep their edge?
Subaiya and Holt assured me that Health 2.0 maintains its independence as part of HIMSS. They will be responsible for some presentations at the mammoth annual HIMSS conferences. They also hope to bring more buyers and sellers together through the HIMSS connection. They see three functions they can provide HIMSS:
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A scanner for what’s new. HIMSS tends to showcase valuable new technologies a couple years after Health 2.0 discovers them.
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A magnet to attract and retain highly innovative people in health IT.
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A mechanism for finding partners for early-stage companies.
Aside from that, they will continue and expand their international presence, which includes the US, Japan, South Korea, China, and India. Interestingly, Subaiya told me that the needs expressed in different countries are similar. There aren’t separate mHealth or IT revolutions for the US and India. Instead, both call for increased used of IT for patient education, for remote monitoring and care, and for point-of-care diagnostics. Whether talking about busy yuppies in the city or isolated rural areas lacking doctors, clinicians find that health care has to go to the patient because the patient can’t always come to a health care center. If somebody can run a test using a cheap strip of paper and send results to a doctor over a cell phone, health coverage becomes more universal. Many areas are also dealing with the strains of aging populations.
HIMSS leadership and Health 2.0 share the recognition that health happens outside the walls of hospitals: in relationships, communities, schools, and homes. Health 2.0 will push that philosophy strongly at HIMSS. They will also hammer on what Subaiya calls health care’s “unacceptables”: disparities across race, gender, and geographic region, continued growth in chronic disease, and resulting cost burdens.
Subaiya and Holt see the original mission of HIMSS as a beneficial one: to create technologies that enhance physician workflows. Old technologies turned out to be brittle and unable to evolve, though, as workflows radically changed. As patient engagement and collaboration became more important, EHRs and other systems fell behind.
Meanwhile, the mobile revolution brought new attention to apps that could empower patients, improve monitoring, and connect everybody in the health care system. But technologists and venture capitalists jumped into health care without adequate research into what the users needed. Health 2.0 was created several years ago to represent the users, particular patients and health care consumers.
Holt says that investment is still increasing, although it may go into services instead of pure tech companies. Some is money moving from life sciences to computer technologies such as digital therapeutics. Furthermore, there are fewer companies getting funded than a few years ago, but each company is getting more money than before and getting it faster.
Subaiya and Holt celebrate the continued pull of health care for technologists, citing not only start-ups but substantial investment by large tech corporations, such as the Alphabet company Verily Life Sciences, Samsung, and Apple. There’s a particularly big increase in the use of data science within health care.
Some companies are integrating with Alexa to make interactions with consumers more natural. Intelligent decision support (as seen for instance in IBM’s Watson) is taking some of the burden off the clinician. For mental health, behavioral health, and addiction, digital tech is reducing stigma and barriers to those who need help.
In short, Health 2.0 should not be constrained by its new-found partner. The environment and funding is here for a tech transformation of health care, and Health 2.0’s work is cut out for it.
