Weekend Roundup: Whereby Jen, Nexthealth Really Get Going and American Well, Hello Health Make Waves

I'm doing a lot of blog/news scrubbing lately as we ramp up for Health 2.0, just over 2 months away in San Francisco.

Fasten your seatbelts ladies and gentlemen; the lineup this show is bigger and better than ever. Companies are showing amazing features. Line up for tickets here.

Meanwhile, perennial Health 2.0 favorites continue to make headlines:

• American Well CEO Roy Schoenberg is interviewed by David Williams at Health Business Blog. Well worth a listen.

• Hello Health's frontrunning physician Jay Parkinson gets some more coverage at The Brooklyn Paper here...pay attention to Jay's title = do you need a Chief Imagineer?

Analyzing the business models of many Health 2.0 firms, you begin to notice something in common.

Despite the astonishing size and spending power of the hospital segment, MOST have taken one look at the siloed, low-margin marketplace and run frantically in the other direction, towards market-oriented, consumer solutions that 'sell' direct to the individual (whether they charge the consumer as part of a freemium model, are VC-funded, or operate using ad-based revenue models).

Many Health 2.0 firms are helping us nibble away around the edges, building a consumer-centric system user by user, providing solutions at an individual level. There are strong exceptions, luckily, American Well is one, with a business-model oriented around the current payor market.

But there are very few, if any, adaptive, fast-moving, Health 2.0 companies providing decision-support resources for existing brick and mortar players, including hospitals.

Someone needs to connect individual and systemic solutions, and provide non-intimidating, accessible ways for hospital teams to plot a roadmap to consumer-centric care using existing needs and future wants.

And they need to do it in a way that drives viral, rapid transfusions.

Some of you are sensing some dramatic irony here. So yeah. I'll admit it. The Nexthealth folks are working on this.

As a result, I'll beg your indulgence - blog posting will be a bit light for the next 2 weeks as we work on building a killer app. and getting speakers ready...see you in Frisco.

Reasons to Celebrate - Personal and Professional

1. The Personal: After 3 days of slow labor, my sister is, even at this moment, working to bring my baby niece into the air-breathing sector. After hours in the Birth Center waiting room at Carilion New River Valley Center, we're all a bit loopy, but this is the first baby of our generation, so forgive the emotional mushiness. Hurry up, Ellen! We're waiting. Mom will tell you I'm not the patient type...

2. The Professional: At AHIP last night - the biggest Health 2.0 move to date. American Well partners with Microsoft (in a "strategic collaboration") and takes on the entire state of Hawaii. Congrats to all involved for carrying us closer to consumer-centric care. The challenges are huge, but I can't think of another team that could tackle the task with such confidence, panache, and an actual chance at success.

Defining Health 3.0 and 4.0

Reading through reviews of the Health 2.0 Unconference NL, I realized we'd hidden some pretty important definitions in lengthy descriptive coverage.

Guilty as charged. This post will hopefully make it easier to find definitions of Health 3.0 and Health 4.0.

A group of us here in Holland are working on Health 4.0, which combines the Health 3.0 principles Dr. Jeff Gruen, Chief Medical Officer @ Revolution Health, names (see attribution here) and adds coherence as the penultimate connector.

If we look at the dot-o movement in healthcare and wellness management numerically (in semantic web terms), we can distill the evolution of the concept down to something like this:

1. Health 1.0 = content

2. Health 2.0 = content + community

3. Health 3.0 = content + community plus consumer-centric commerce

4. Fully realized Health 4.0 = content + community + working commerce models + coherence (connectors)

On Saturday we had the first Health 2.0 Unconference in Amsterdam, where both practical and philosophical concerns on how to bring about consumer-centric care (human-to-human) were big topics of conversation.

There's a further review of the Health 2.0 progression to 3.0 (and goals for eventual 4.0 evolution) in my nitty gritty review of the event.

So has Health 3.0 arrived?

I think we're on the way, with some firms starting to reach for the 4.0 pinnacle, in which consumers can access care research, tracking, delivery and integration using both online and offline models.

There are a few companies with viable business models that create a platform for sustainability.

Three top picks include Organized Wisdom, Hello Health/Myca, and American Well.

It's no coincidence one of these firms uses systemic buyers to fund/funnel services to consumers via payer platforms (insurance companies), a revenue model that stands out in the current ad-funded glut.

The other two provide open access linking consumers to healthcare providers, and ALL THREE link patients/healthcare consumers to docs in one way or another.

Again, it's the 3Cs of Health 3.0 - Content (Organized Wisdom Wisdom Cards), Community (all), and Commerce (American Well partnering with HMOs to offer doc access services direct to consumers, Hello Health providing self-pay concierge doc services).

Newcomer Limeade also makes the cut (more on Limeade later), and SugarStats.com provides content + community and the interconnectivity we'll come to expect from Health 4.0 firms (you can send stats to your doc).

More examples later, but if you want to learn more you should be in Vegas next month attending this.