Defragmenting Health – One App At A Time

Today’s healthcare environment is difficult enough. You have data with your provider (MD, hospital, clinic); your pharmacy; your health plan; your worker’s comp carrier; your personal health record (PHR); your grocery (vitamins, supplements); your gym; and your lab. People communicate with you based on those different pieces of data or perhaps consolidated components of that data.

Each entity has a different agenda or purpose and potentially different opinions. Combine this with direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising, research you do yourself, and word-of-mouth and it can be overwhelming.

As we move into an “apps” culture where everyone has an application for you to put on your smart phone, are we simply going to continue this defragmentation, accelerate it, or actually address it. I suspect we will accelerate it. You will have all these traditional players along with all the Health 2.0 players that are trying to leverage their cool Internet functions into applications for managing what you eat, your workouts, your condition, sharing data, etc.

I think this is a problem.