By MATTHEW HOLT

Health 2.0 is best known for (and started with) consumers using online tools, search, communities and other services. But over the last year or two we’ve seen more and more SaaS-based and modular tools developed aimed at physicians and their offices. At the same time of course the Feds have promised (but not quite started yet) to lay out up to $36 billion to put EMRs into doctors’ offices.

The problem is that most physicians practice as independent small businesses, and almost all the progress in mainstream EMR adoption has been in larger enterprises–particularly the VA using Vista and many larger provider systems (e.g. Kaiser) using Epic and a few other larger client-server based systems. But smaller businesses outside of health care are using a whole range of SaaS-based services to run their operations. For example, at Health 2.0 we use Highrise for customer tracking, Google Docs for records, Gmail for sharing information, Skype for communication, Surveymonkey for attendee surveys, Mailchimp for marketing emails, and several others.

Can physician offices use a parallel set of modular applications to run their various business and clinical processes? I believe that they can and will. But the problem is how to get the message out? So I was pretty interested to find that Sanofi Aventis is trying to reach physicians about these issues via a site called iPractice. They asked (and commissioned) me to write something about the topic. So I’ve described seven modular Health 2.0 tools for physicians. You can read my article here