In case there was any proof required that the eHealth industry in the US is working well, then Manhattan Research just provided it. In their new Cybercitizen Health v8.0 study they declare that “the number of Health 2.0 consumers has doubled since 2007…to over 60 million”. Wow! That’s one healthy and booming market, not that any additional proof was needed considering the number of innovative companies showcasing their products at Health 2.0.
Yesterday we set out to compare that to the UK and spent a few hours searching for eHealth innovation there. Unfortunately not much came up, it was extremely hard to find any health information portals or social networks. It seems that the government run NHS system is the main source of eHealth in the UK with very few private companies involved. It seems that the NHS HealthSpace system, which is still under development, will incorporate many of the features that we see private companies running in the US, such as social networking, telemedicine, ePrescriptions etc.
While on the one hand this can be a great system because it ensures inter-operability between the various modules right from the start, there is also a risk that the UK continues spending large sums of money on awarding contracts to companies that create solutions which struggle to get adopted by the health community and leave the UK seemingly still no further along in their goal of “universal healthcare”.
Our recommendation would be to allow some level of market driven technologies to develop around the NHS systems by creating something akin to the Facebook Platform or Opensocial, basically a set of APIs with which private companies could build applications on top of the NHS foudation. This could speed up development of new technologies, create value-added services and ensure that NHS systems are innovated upon by the market while still allowing the NHS to retain control of data and privacy standards.
When we recently floated this idea on twitter, one of the responses was that this may not be possible because of privacy issues, but we believe that in a time when we aggregate our credit card and bank accounts into online services through ‘user opt-in’, then we should be able to do the same with our patient records.
If you have any info or comments on this subject please leave a comment below.
