Health 3.0 – Ubiquitous Transparency

I was thinking about dieting over the weekend and thought back to an idea I had many years ago.  The concept then was to create a data integration layer for the smart house that integrated the data from your multiple devices.  Imagine the following:

You set a diet plan.  Your virtual health coach (think artificial intelligence) looks at your daily calendar and the food you have at home.  It proactively recommends what you should eat at the restaurant you are going to for lunch; orders a few items from the grocery store to be ready for pick-up on the way home; prints out the cooking instructions; and pre-heats the oven when you are 5 minutes away from home. 

Over time, it plots your caloric intake and suggests workouts based on your calendar and biorhythms. 

If I expand this concept, I would see this as a Health 3.0 type application.  Total integration of data (home, work, health).  Total transparency of information (healthcare, lab, medical, cost, quality, consumer goods).  And, availability of information anywhere and anytime.

I am sure there are definitions, but I think about Health 1.0 and Health 2.0 as the following:

1. Health 1.0 was several things – workflow oriented applications (e.g., practice management systems), e-prescribing, online content (e.g., WebMD), and transaction hubs.  I saw the focus here on efficiency, quality, and connectivity.
2. Health 2.0 is still developing and includes transparency and web tools.  I see the focus here on pushing information from companies into the hands of consumers. 

Surprising (or maybe not), there are several people using the term Health 3.0.  Here were a few things I found:

1. Money magazine article about home monitoring and companies like Health Hero, NxStage, iCare, and CareMatix.
2. This link which talks about the semantic web but has little other information.
3. An article about the Health 2.0 conference which mentions Health 3.0:
   • Things start to change when the institutions don’t control all the information. Even though the largest flow of money will still be centralized and often mis-directed, the new user tools will make all the tangles more visible.

     At that point, the Health 3.0 conference will have to include folks from the establishment – government, large software vendors and entrenched health-care institutions.

 Who knows when and where Health 3.0 will really appear, but I generally disagree with the opinion that Health 2.0 isn’t real because there aren’t business models.  In the early dotcom days, the business models were limited.  Those that figured them out – WebMD, Amazon, eBay – survived.  First you figure out the concept and the value add.  Then, you figure out who can pay for it.