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IBM has announced an online "radiology theatre" product, currently at the prototype stage, which allows teams of medical experts to "simultaneously discuss and review patients' medical test data using a Web browser." The project is being run in collaboration with the Brigham and Women's Hospital of Boston and is built on IBM's next-generation browser platform Blue Spruce, which ReadWriteWeb reviewed when it was first announced back in November. IBM also used the WebKit Open Source Browser Engine. The app runs on the Linux or MacOS X operating systems and the browser may be Safari or Internet Explorer.

"There are 2.2 billion mobile phones in the developing world, 305 million computers but only 11 million hospital beds," said Terry Kramer, strategy director at British operator Vodafone at the Mobile World Congress held in Barcelona this week. That's why Vodafone, along with the United Nations and the Rockerfeller Foundation's mHealth Alliance have banded together to advance the use of mobile phones to better aid those in need of healthcare in the developing world.

Following the recent peanut-butter-borne Salmonella outbreak, the United States Department of Health and Human Services - specifically the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention - engaged in a heavy social media push to inform citizens about the health risks and product recalls. The result? The formation of the CDC Social Media Center, a new appreciation for the speed at which news travels via social media, and likely hundreds - if not thousands - saved from illness and death.

IBM, Google Health and a consortium of medical device makers and other companies announced today that they have created a software platform that will allow medical data from at-home devices like glucose meters and blood pressure monitors to be sent automatically to Google Health or other Personal Health Records systems online. It's a broad reaching software platform that will bring data portability and medical records interoperability in direct conflict with a huge industry entrenched in siloed data.

If you think that "data portability" and standards for an open web hold a lot of promise to fuel innovation in social networking, just imagine what a secure, standards-based, data landscape could enable in health care.

According to Manhattan Research, a healthcare market research company, personal health records (PHR) are slowly becoming more popular in the U.S., but concerns about privacy and a lack of understanding, as well as doubts about the efficiency of PHRs are holding back widespread adoption. Only about 7 million adults in the U.S. actually use PHRs. Especially those without serious illnesses often don't see the need for using electronic health records.

Two years ago, HopeLab released Re-Mission, a shoot 'em up game with a difference in an attempt to help cancer afflicted teenagers stick to their medication. This past August, clinical evidence was published in the medical journal Pediatrics showing the game is a success.

HopeLab, a nonprofit organization founded by Pam Omidyar, was named one of Fast Company magazine's 2009 Social Enterprises of the Year this month for its efforts in improving the health and quality of life of young people with chronic illness.

On Monday we reviewed the state of health 2.0 and it was also the topic of this week's RWW Live, our live podcast show. At the end of the podcast, I asked all the panelists to list their favorite health 2.0 app (about the 58:30 mark if you want to listen to it). I've listed all the apps the panelists chose at the end of this post, but I wanted to highlight my own choice in this post. I selected MyMedLab, an online lab testing service - despite it being only available in the U.S. There appear to be two key benefits to MyMedLab, and similar services such as MedLabUSA. One is that a doctor's prescription isn't required because the test requests are approved by in-house physicians. The second is that tests can be completely confidential to the user. Both of these benefits have drawbacks though, which we'll discuss below.

Web 2.0 is coming soon to consumer medical information services, says Gordon Gould. He reckons the most interesting apps won't come from established Web medical players, like WebMD, but rather from startups. Gordon thinks the established companies are too Web 1.0 - "monolithic, closed, and mostly just about info-retrieval". 

WebMD's mission seems to be to help "navigate the complexity of the healthcare system" and so it necessarily has a broad reach - from doctors to patients to providers. So perhaps Gordon is right and innovation will come from presumably more focused and agile Healthcare startups.

Rajesh Jain from Emergic has a similar post about IT in the Healthcare system. He quotes from an article in The Economist, which says the healthcare industry must get patient information "out of paper files and into electronic databases" and make it interoperable. But more than that, decision-making should be moved to the edges of the network (i.e. "by patients in consultation with their doctors") and not centralised. 

The Economist's conclusion is similar to Gordon's - the goal is ultimately "to enable individuals, at last, to have access to, and possession of, information about their own health."