Certainly one of the fields most affected by the Internet’s information free-for-all is healthcare. For good and ill, nearly everyone now uses the Internet to check on symptoms, treatments and research. Witness the spectacular popularity of such web sites as WebMD. To most caregivers, this flood of easily accessible information has been a mixed blessing, what with issues such as self-diagnosis and patients second-guessing physicians.

Healthcare vendors also need to confront the consequences of democratic freedom of information access. Recently, there was a lot of press about Hugo Campos, (see his blog here) a patient-activist who was demanding that Medtronic release to him the raw data captured by the company’s implantable cardiac defibrillator, which had been implanted in Mr. Campos in 2007.

Any medical device company should have in place – right now – a carefully considered strategy

Any medical device company should have a strategy

After some fits and starts, Medtronic complied with Mr. Campos’ request. But before doing so, Medtronic wrestled with the issue, particularly how it might affect their relationship with doctors – their direct customers. As Mr. Campos himself put it, “CRDM companies rely on their relationship with doctors to sell their products. Going directly to patients can offset this balance and be seen as having a potentially deleterious effect on their business. They are very careful to not upset the relationship doctors have with their patients.”

Mr. Campos appears to know the impact requests such as his may have on the industry. “I am asking for a significant shift in the way medical device companies do business,” he says.
Those of us in healthcare can justifiably fret about the potential consequences of providing what is often highly technical data to those without the training to correctly interpret that data. But the fact is, the genie is out of the bottle. Any medical device company should have in place – right now – a carefully considered strategy for how to respond when faced with a scenario comparable to the one faced by Medtronics. Not doing so means you run the risk of alienating your customers and suffering a public relations fiasco.

Summing up the SXSWi held in Austin, TX from March 12-15th I’d have to say ‘opportunity’ and ‘uncertainty’ were the two words that came up the most following the Social Health sessions at this event.

Opportunity lies ahead for mHealth application development and healthcare IT, as pointed out by Tim O’Reilly, CEO of O’Reilly Media, considered to be a thought leader in emerging technology trends.   At the end of his keynote interview he turned to the audience and encouraged all the entrepreneurs to seriously consider Healthcare IT for start-up opportunities there.

And on the mHealth app development front John Pettengill at Razorfish rightly pointed out, mHealth apps need to be patient focused not technology focused, especially when dealing with chronic conditions.  Just because coders can pull out lots of charts and graphs from the data doesn’t mean that it will be useful or attractive to paitents.  As for healthcare IT, the best sessions dealing with Health 2.0, EHRs and the huge gray area of how this uncertain market will develop were the #health2dev session moderated by Indu Subaiya and following session on health apps with BJ Fogg from Stanford University.

At one point Professor Fogg asked how many gamers/app developers were in the audience and one lone guy raised his hand in a room of 100+ people.  I’ll be interested to see how many more gamers will make their into this audience next year.  I think there will be many more.