Many innovations in health care are happening in private enterprise, and these rapid fire talks from the Gov 2.0 Summit feature two of them.
Founder Carleen Hawn discusses the people and innovations featured on Healthspottr, a website that highlights innovative health practicioners around the world. Some are improvements in patient interaction, like the doctor in San Francisco that emails active patients asking them how their treatment is working. Others are more technologically complex, like an SMS-based private communication network used by clinics in rural Africa. For all however, the focus is on cost-efficiency and speed of delivery.
PatientsLikeMe co-founder, Stephen Heywood, explains how the site allows communities to form around medical conditions. In exchange for sharing all of their data, patients can compare themselves to others with a similar condition. Patients have contributed more data than the largest clinical trials, and can access data unavailable elsewhere. They can learn about normal symptoms, effective treatments, and what they can expect from the future as their disease progresses.
These two presentations demonstrate how the future of health-care is also tapping into the social and open data revolution.
Carleen Hawn is the founder of Healthspottr. Prior to founding Healthspottr, Carleen was an associate editor with Forbes and, later, a senior writer and west coast bureau chief for Fast Company magazine. While with Forbes, she created the well-known Midas List, an index of leading venture capital dealmakers, now in its ninth year of publication. Carleen holds a BA in political science from Barnard College and a master’s degree from Columbia Journalism School, and was a Knight-Bagehot Fellow at Columbia Business School. She currently contributes to Health Affairs. Her work can also be found in the archives of Financial Week, Ode, Business 2.0, Inc., San Francisco, and Outside.
James Heywood serves as chairman of PatientsLikeMe, where he provides the scientific vision and architecture for its patient-centered medical platform. He co-founded the company in 2005 with his youngest brother, Benjamin, and friend, Jeff Cole. Named one of “15 companies that will change the world” by CNNMoney, PatientsLikeMe is a personalized research and peer-care platform that allows patients to share in-depth information on treatments, symptoms and outcomes. Jamie is a frequent speaker, media pundit and an active investment advisor. His work has been profiled in the New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, BusinessWeek, 60 Minutes, Science, Nature as well as in Pulitzer Prize winner Jonathan Wiener’s biography, His Brothers Keeper and the Sundance award-winning documentary, “So Much So Fast.”
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