Can you handle the stream?
HealthStreaming is something that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. We have all kinds of streams of data that help us make decisions these days: blogs, reviews, recommendations, financial data, etc. When I look at the data we’re gathering on the health side, I see a real disconnect: its primarily billing and clinical data built for doctors, hospitals, and insurance companies rather than the information that would help me to understand and improve my health.
Its not a surprising state of affairs: the consumer is not the customer of health care today, and information is gathered to meet the needs of health insurers, employers, providers, vendors (incl. pharma) and researchers. I would assert that most of this stuff in its current form is useless to consumers.
Yet, if we want to capture the experience and personalization we see in other places in our lives, we need to create the HealthStreaming infrastructure that captures and aggregates the data that actually matters for consumers as we all make our own health choices. As we’ve seen with EMR and PHR adoption rates, platforms like Google Health or Microsoft HealthVault are unlikely to take off until the data we want to use follows us with little effort, and killer apps allow us to use them in ways that transform our lives.
