Even if you only got a whiff of the product demo sessions at the Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco this week, you noticed: sensors are getting smaller, cheaper, and more closely integrated into tools we already use.

Consider Pulse Sensor, a dime-sized device that uses a beam of light to measure a person’s heartbeat. For $25, customers get a sensor kit that plugs directly into an Arduino microcontroller, the staple device of any DIY hardware hacker. Attach the sensor to an earlobe or fingertip and the light beam measures changes in tissue volume to gauge a person’s pulse. To date, the company has already raised over $18,000 on Kickstarter.

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People use Facebook, Twitter, or other social media sites as channels for self-expression. But whether updating or uploading, people are telling their social stories with only two tools: text and images.

But what if social media wasn’t confined to words and pictures, but instead, allowed users to uploaded graphs or tables? In other words, could data, pure data, become a token in our social currency?

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“The human body does enormously well healing itself,” Keas founder, and ex-Google Health lead, Adam Bosworth told Health 2.0 conference-goers shortly after stepping on stage.  On the heels of an article in the New York Times that touted the company’s beta launch, Bosworth walked the crowd through the way we’ll keep ourselves healthy in the future, using Keas’ platform.

Of all people, Bosworth understood the potential power of the internet on health, where the collective wisdom of the patient population could reach thousands, or millions, of other people.  So he wondered, if people were readily turning to the web for information when they got sick, could customized, preemptive web advice keep people from getting sick in the first place?

By personalizing the measures we can take to stave off certain predisposed conditions, Keas’ Care Plans should improve our health.  But the real promise of the company, wasn’t in what Bosworth delivered onstage, but rather, in something he simply mentioned in passing.  Bosworth alluded to the idea that not only will Keas’ platform let people track their own health, but it could also allow people to keep tabs on their family’s health as well.

The most impressive tool for clinical decision-making presented at the Health 2.0 conference was a program that allowed docs to share medical images over the Internet, developed by MyPACS.net.  Any DICOM image (e.g. CT scan, MRI, etc) can be uploaded and shared through their website.

Say, for example, that a patient comes to the hospital with abdominal pains.  After undergoing a CT scan, the radiologist determines that there is a mass located in the abdominal cavity, but is not quite sure what it is.  Traditionally, the radiologist would either compare the patient’s CT to scans in the hospital archive, or spend hours searching through the limited information in medical journals.  With MyPACS.net, doctors can upload and share hundreds or thousands of images, instantaneously.  It’s like Facebook photos or Flickr for physicians.

Not only would this system help a small-town hospital that has limited DICOM image archives, but it also eliminates the 6-10 month lag in publication of images in medical journals.

Welcome to Day 2 of the Health 2.0 conference.  There was an interesting talk this morning focused on “Consumer Aggregators”, which demoed new applications from WebMD, Google Health, and Microsoft Heath Vault.

Wayne Gattinella of WebMD summarized the state of affairs, saying that people want to access information on the go, and there’s a drastic need for medical applications to go mobile.  According to Gatinella, this means creating applications for both physicians, in a point-of-care setting, as well as patients, who want on-demand information about their health.

All three companies agreed that people are sharing more and more personal health data online these days.  Gattinella paralleled patients sharing their medical information to using credit cards online 10 years ago.  At first, people were skeptical and scared.  After successfully trying it out a few times, fears subsided, and the convenience benefit far outweighed the perceived risk.

Each application displayed different, but equally cool, themes.  Microsoft built their application around the idea that patients should be able to customize the layout as they wanted — place your blood pressure widget here, your LDL cholesterol level widget over there.

Google Health’s application stressed the fact that less than 25% of what a doctor tells a patient during an office visit is actually remembered by that patient when they get home.  Google closes this gap in communication in the MDLiveCare application by feeding all of the doctor’s notes back into the patient’s Google Health record, so that the patient can recap the visit at a later time.

WebMD had a nifty iPhone application with a ‘symptom tracker’, which launched with of a cartoon-like drawing of a human body (i.e. the “virtual patient”).  Sore ankle?  Click on the virtual patient’s ankle, and you’ll be presented with some common symptoms that involve the ankle, such as ‘swelling’, ‘rash’, or ‘laceration’.  As the patient navigates through the menu system and answers questions, their symptoms are further refined until the system figures out what is wrong.  Ultimately, the patient is presented with a description of the possible problem, e.g. “Click here for information on ankle sprain”, which takes you to the WebMD entry for sprained ankles.

I really liked how the focus of this group was “on-demand” information, and all of the applications were tailored to helping the patient gain control of their medical information.  The data is theirs to begin with, let’s give them a way to harness it…

from: well.blogs.nytimes.com

The afternoon of Day 1 of the Health 2.0 Conference was highlighted by the session, “The Patient is In”.  First up, a video that documented the experiences of a group of people that recently started using patient health tools, such as online health journals that track diet or exercise, support sites for quitting smoking, or home blood test kits.

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The morning session focused on clinician-patient interactions.  Executives from Myca, VisionTree, AmericanWell, and ReachMyDoctor, presented their virtual doctors’ office visit tools.

All of the tools had similar features, such as online scheduling, and the choice of different types of offices visits, such as IM chat or video.  Most integrated well with personal health records, so that during an office visit, the physician had access to the patient’s medication refill history, or overdue routine preventive medical tests, such as blood-work, prostate screens, or mammograms.

At the end of the panel discussion, several good questions were asked.  People wondered what incentives were in place for physicians and patients to use the system, especially if each doctor was using a different system.  Does this mean that the patient will have to log on to two different websites if their general practitioner uses HelloHealth, but their cardiologist uses AmericanWell?  The panel responded that each of these web applications was part of a larger central platform.  It may be more helpful to think of each web tool as an individual iPhone app.  iPhone apps can communicate with each other and run on a single system (phone), so it’s possible for these individual web tools to play nicely together in the future.  One question I had: where are all of the patient tools that plug into this central platform?  Maybe that’s tomorrow’s talk…

The second session brought out some pretty tough critics of the virtual doctor’s office idea.  Although these new panelists liked what they were seeing and hearing, at heart, they were still physicians that saw many challenges to using these products in their own practice.  A psychiatrist was the first to challenge, saying that good psychotherapy demands face-to-face interactions.  I’ve seen this type of push-back from doctors before while consulting at medical device start-up companies.  No matter how transformative or revolutionary the new technology could be, unless doctors can easily integrate the technology into their current practice, the idea may flounder.

Yesterday at the Kaiser HealthCamp Un-Conference, a cool term surfaced — “minimally disruptive technology” — which was used to describe an approach to reform health care technology that pushed progress, while not upsetting the status quo, so to speak.  Granted, there is a learning curve associated with any new technology, and to implement an idea such as virtual doctors’ office visits will require significant infrastructure changes in the medical community.

Will only a fringe group of early adapters use this technology?  Is it realistic to think that a majority of doctors will use such a system?  Too early to tell, but it wouldn’t hurt to get some of the nay-sayers involved with the design while the concept is still in its early stages.

U.S. CTO, Aneesh Chopra

The Health 2.0 conference kicked off this morning, amidst the booming call-to-action by the U.S. Chief Technology Officer, Aneesh Chopra during the Keynote Address.

Chopra assured the crowd that he was “deeply committed to the role entrepreneurs play (in the future of health care)”.  Yet, he wondered whether companies were using all of the resources currently available to them, when he asked “How many companies are using Small Business Innovation Research grants (SBIR) to bring their products to market?”.

According to Chopra, the U.S. government has new initiatives on the horizon, such as subsidizing 2/3 of the salaries of 40 postdocs who decide to enter industry.  That means an employer can pick up a new PhD hire at 1/3 of the cost!

Chopra concluded by addressing the current economic downturn with his “light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel” attitude by saying “the next round of Fortune 500 companies will be born in this era”.

My take: it was a good introduction to the potential promise scattered throughout the room.