Q. What is Health2.0 and why are we running conferences about it?

The term Web2.0 has been around since 2003. The O’Reilly organization both coined the term and created a definition that year, and then they went on to create the Web 2.0 Conference. Meanwhile over at The Health Care Blog and in his by now relatively long consulting career, Matthew Holt has been following technology in health care since the early 1990s. Some of his eHealth era reminisences were relatively poignant…Indu Subaiya, a healthcare consultant and entrepreneur was similarly starting to follow Web 2.0 trends and their impact on health as she embarked on designing a prototype for a medical record-sharing website.

Towards the middle of 2006 several start-ups began targeting health care using Web 2.0 technologies such as wikis, mash-ups, video, blogs communities, and user-generated data. And to be fair Wondir which has since been sucked into the Revolution Health vortex started a now seemingly defunct blog called Health 2.0 in late 2005. In early November 2006 Matthew did a podcast with 3 Health 2.0 companies on THCB, and the community was beginning to emerge.  (From now on Matthew is switching to “I” & “me”)

Two events crystallized this. First an article in Business 2.0 (part of CNNMoney these days) which was the first "mainstream" mention of Health 2.0 outside the blogs, and the December 2006 Healthcamp "unconference” in which several of us got talking about the topic. (Here’s a photo with Enoch Choi standing & talking and me apparently falling asleep on my hand at the far end of the table! And here’s Health2.0 co-founder Indu Subaiya eating health food!).

Continue at the Health 2.0 site

There’s been enough bad behavior in Medicare private health plans to go around, but some of the worst behavior has come from private FFS plans, and some of the worst behavior of all has come from WellCare, a Medicaid and Medicare plan in Florida. Last Wednesday the FBI raided Wellcare, with allegations of fraud and presumably a qui tam suit in the works. And since then the stock is down some 70%.

Just another story of another private organization pushed by Wall Street to over plunder Medicare? After all I’ve been writing about why Wall Street Hates Healthcare Services But Doesn’t Know It for years. (Apparently George Soros, who, despite his liberal foreign policy leanings, isn’t above making the odd buck or two, made out like a bandit from Wellcare).

Well almost, but then there’s one little wrinkle.

Because there are also others apart from the single-payer advocates who don’t like health plans. In fact one prominent consumer advocate from her lofty ivory tower has proclaimed health insurers as one of those who’ve been “killing” healthcare.

Who killed healthcare?

Regina E. HerzlingerPosted 09/07/2007 (Medscape)

We turn over $2.2 trillion of our money each year to those who manage our healthcare, without holding them accountable for efficiency or quality. Not surprisingly, these folks — hospitals, insurers, governments — they use the money to benefit themselves. Jack Morgan, the insured, middle-class protagonist in Who Killed Health Care? was killed by this system.

Insurers, hospitals, and governments have gotten fat on our bloated healthcare costs, which kill the competitiveness of US firms.

<SNIP>

That’s my opinion. I’m Professor Regina Herzlinger of the Harvard Business School.

But funnily enough, there must have been something different between WellCare and those other “insurers” that were “getting fat on our bloated healthcare costs”. Different enough that Regina Herzlinger allowed herself to be appointed to the WellCare board in 2003.

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