At a health conference in San Francisco on Thursday, participants focused on Health 2.0, a buzz word for online ventures that aim to improve health care by expanding the public's access to Web tools such as customized health search engines and social networking sites, the San Jose Mercury News reports.
Current Health 2.0 offerings include Web sites that allow consumers to:
- Rate doctors online, such as ratemds.com;
- Shop for medical prices and locations, such as vimo.com;
- Search for medical information, such as webmd.com or healia.com; and
- Share patient experiences, such as dailystrength.com and patientslikeme.com.
"A lot of these services have just really begun in the past year," John Grohol, founder of PsychCentral.com said, adding, "It's not clear that they will be successful."
Many conference participants also asked how these sites plan to make money because most offer no-cost services and are expensive to operate. Online advertisements and partnerships with employers and health insurers generate some revenue, and some of the sites are backed with millions in venture capital funding, the
Mercury News reports (Feder Ostrov,
San Jose Mercury News, 9/21).