Health 2.0 Adds a Cutting Edge to the Healthcare Sector

A host of trends emerged in the healthcare industry last year that will dominate the healthcare market in 2008. The manifestation of these changes will take healthcare forward in fundamentally positive and far-reaching ways. Different pundits cite different trends but they tend to agree on the major one - Health 2.0.

To get an idea of Health 2.0 is, it is essential to grasp the term Web 2.0. Web 2.0 is the spans across all connected devices ... creating network effects through 'architecture of participation.' The tools used in Web 2.0 are search engines, wikis, blogs, video, online communities and mashups that enable a consumer-generated content.

Health 2.0 imports these and applies them to health, with the objective of affecting healthcare for the better. Incase you have a website to promote your healthcare offerings; you can update it to the Health 2.0 mode. Such sites may have an "Architecture of participation" that encourages users to add value to the application as they use it. This stands in contrast to very old traditional websites, the sort that limit visitors to viewing and whose content only the site's owner could modify. Recent studies have shown that more and more users are keen on visting the interactive sites, that is the one updated with Web 2.0.

Source: SixChannels

Here are a few highlights at some of the features of Health 2.0.

Second Life

Second Life, is a tool of Health 2.0. It is a virtual world where you can create your second life. In case your patient is suffering of any hear diseases, he can try, how it is to undergo ECG or ask a virtual doctor.

User-based Sites

You can create a link to some sites like Sugarstats.com or Traineo.com. These sites will enable your users to track his insulin intake or weight loss. They will provide them both assistance and motivation to reach their expectations regarding their health.

Medical Wikis

Web 2.0 based databases allows your patients to edit-write the articles yourself. Thus you can give them this option so that the interation over the web becomes a two way communication, rather then a usual one way traffic.

Communities

You can embed links of certain sites on your website, which are actually online communities. Here, your patient can find people dealing with the same health challenges. They can read about their medical problems described by others.

Mediac Blogs

Medical blogs provide content and express opinion on healthcare that you can never find in a medical paper. So you can open up a blog of your on youe website to allow your visitos to blog. You can also put links of your blog on leading medical blogs to invite top blogggers to blog in your website.

Medical Search Engines

Get your site optimized and registeted to the top medical search engines. Search engines like Google, Yahoo are not always the best choices foer best medical search results. The medical search engines offer the easiest way for consumers to quickly and easily find consistently excellent health information on the Web. Some leading medical search engines are:

• Healthline
• MedHunt
• Mamma Health
• Omni Medical Search
• Medical Podcasts and Videocasts

You can put podcasts and videocasts on your website. Podcasts and videocasts make reading blogs more comfortable. They are portable audio and video files.They can be listened to

Some good medical podcasts

• ACC Conversations with Experts
• Journal of the American Medical Association
• New England Journal of Medicine
• Lancet
• John Hopkins Medicine
• iCritical Care Podcast

Videocasts

• National Institute of Health VideoCasting
• Cleveland Clinic Videocast

Health 2.0 will help both the medical practitioners and the patients in terms of taking clinical decisions, purchasing decisions and understanding performances relative to the market. And as payments are tied to results, this information will constitute motivation for performance and deterrent for waste.

Contact the experts at SixChannels to add a cutting edge to your healthcare business

Download Here for PDF