The bigger picture
Having taken a look at the emerging effort by Google and others in "user generated healthcare," my mind starts to turn over what some of the longer-term prospects might be. A few personal hunches about the future have crossed my mind.
The really big information utilities are being drawn in by the knowledge that health is one of the top uses of their systems. And, it follows, that category has a huge potential to attract advertisers and product producers. Users and advertisers–demand side and supply side.
Big search utilities have the opportunity to become information and service integrators. Most health information sources on the Web are specialized. The ACS is an expert resource in cancer. There are many other cancer resources and a huge number of web sites on every malady under the sun. The big aggregators like WebMD, Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft will vie to become the top brand brining together all those sources as an entry portal for all things about health. And information is just the beginning. They’ll have EHR, products, physicians, clinics, support groups, drug information, etc., etc., etc. This is getting to be known as health 2.0.
I would assume that once an aggregator becomes a trusted entry point for one kind of health information and service they become the go-to source on other health issues. Why would people jump around looking for new sources each time they have a health question if they can start at one trusted point?
Seems to me the big boys have the chance to render another needed service: brining back an integrated sense of health and body. During the 20th Century science and medicine went radically reductionist. The body was too complex to explain as a whole so it got fragmented into many, many small pieces. Each organ, each tissue, each disease became the object of deeper and deeper specialized study. Cancer became one specialty, heart ailments became another, giving birth another and so on. It was necessary to do this to get to the bottom of the causes of problems. Organizations, physicians, scientists, research institutes, government agencies: all became specialists in some part of the medical mystery. Somewhere along the way a sense of wholeness and integration of the human organism got lost. Here in the 21st Century we’re down looking at the molecules of genes, metabolic pathways and much, much more.
I don’t think we’ve reached the bottom of the reductionist well yet, but we’re getting there. Now perhaps the time is right to start putting the health perspective back together and integrating the massive amounts of information that medical science has mined. Build a sense of wholeness that’s scientifically sound from DNA and proteins on up. I don’t see an NGO or government agency that is doing that, so perhaps Google can do it. Perhaps after becoming the great aggregator it can become the great whole-body, whole-person modeler. Start working on reconciling the conflicting viewpoints of the specialists. Start giving guidance that enable us to find a health path that is beneficial overall and not just avoiding one problem at a time. It seems to me that bringing the pieces together would be a tremendous service. Somebody’s got to do it.
Hmm, maybe that’s health 3.0.
