A Few Compelling Health 2.0 Tweets

This week the Health 2.0 Conference has been happening in Silicon Valley. The twitter stream has been extremely active if you want to hear what’s being said at the conference. Here are a few nuggets of wisdom from the stream and my thoughts on them.


This is a scary idea to consider, but Francois is right about the cost of healthcare. So far I have seen little that’s working to drive the cost of healthcare down. Are feedback loops the right answer? I’m not sure, but I do think information on the costs is part of the answer.


I hope mobile health and sensors can go deeper than this. Although, I was probably drawn to the tweet because when I was younger I was hugging a girl when she asked, “Why is your heart beating so fast?” I guess she was way ahead of the sensor game.


Is this scary or exciting? I’d probably say 5 years, but otherwise agree.


Reminds me of when Farzad Mostashari asked, “Can Healthcare ‘Step on a Scale’ Today?” Data helps us realize reality.


Reminds me of the off stated, correlation does not equal causation.


Always a great reminder of what should really be the focus of healthcare: the patient.

Post a Comment(1)
October 2, 2013 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 6000 articles with John having written over 3000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 14 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John launched two new companies: InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com, and is an advisor to docBeat. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: and and .

Filed Under: Health Care  Healthcare IT  mHealth  Mobile Health Care
Tags:            

Does Wellness Just Shift Costs as Opposed to Reduce Costs?

Whenever the discussions of healthcare costs come up, you always hear people saying that the reason healthcare costs are so high is because we have a sick care system as opposed to a healthcare system. If we’d just focus our efforts on promoting wellness, we could lower the costs of healthcare dramatically.

I’ve long been interested in the idea of wellness lowering costs. On face, the idea seems to have merits. If I’m on a wellness program and avoid a sickness, then I won’t have to use our healthcare system to treat that sickness. However, I’ve always wondered if all that wellness programs do is shift costs as opposed to reducing costs on the macro level. In the case described, maybe my wellness program just delayed the sickness by 5 years as opposed to making sure it never happens again. This would mean it was just a 5 year cost shift as opposed to a permanent savings.

I’ll admit that this is just a concept that I’m considering. I’m happy to be proven otherwise.

For example, if a wellness program helps people avoid something like obesity, then it’s possible that we could permanently avoid a whole variety of sicknesses and diseases that are caused by obesity. Considering the discount insurance providers give non-smokers, my guess is that something similar could be applied to smoking.

I imagine if we researched this in depth we’d find a mixed basket of results. In many cases I think wellness programs do just time shift the healthcare costs. However, if you attack the right wellness issues, then you could permanently avoid healthcare costs for specific diseases.

Has anyone done or know of research on this? Which wellness issues can really help reduce healthcare costs permanently? If we knew this, maybe we could focus much of our mobile health efforts.

Post a Comment(0)
August 23, 2013 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 6000 articles with John having written over 3000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 14 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John launched two new companies: InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com, and is an advisor to docBeat. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: and and .

Filed Under: Health Care  Healthcare IT
Tags:  Wellness Programs