Researchers focused specifically on tools for managing diabetes, but the drawbacks could extend to other tools designed to help patients do everything from lose weight to quit smoking. The study concluded that "despite their abundance, few practical web-accessible tools exist." In many case, the tools suffered from poor design that made them difficult to use.

Of the 92 web tools analyzed in the study, 60% had three or more usability errors, included limited use of visual interaction and navigation that was not intuitive. Just 6% had no usability errors

One of the biggest problems facing web-based health tools is patients often use them inconsistently. A weight-loss patient tracking calories with a mobile phone app, for example, may not record everything eaten in a given day.

The study recommended companies offering such tools work on improving attrition, standardizing quality indicators and making indicators transparent for patients and doctors choosing the best web-based tool.

"Web-based tools have the potential to improve health outcomes and complement healthcare delivery, but their full potential is hindered by limited knowledge about their effectiveness, high prevalence of usability errors and high attrition rates," Yu wrote.

Zygote Media Group, which provided the imagery for Google's modeling, has built Zygote Body with the code. It offers the same navigation and features. To support this launch, the Google Body team has built a new, open-source 3D viewer at open-3d-viewer.googlecode.com. Thanks to the work of Google engineers, any developer can now use the same kind of 3D model browser for her or his own project.

Google has tried out lots of neat-o knowledge projects in the name of "organizing the world's information," only to find that they aren't tenable parts of Google's for-profit plans. As Sergey Brin told us at Web 2.0 last year, Google has long embraced the "letting 1,000 flowers bloom" strategy. While it's now gathering a select few of those flowers into "a nice bouquet" called Google+, some great Google projects have gone open-source.

In November, Google did the same thing to Knol, its Wikipedia-like collaborative knowledge database. It relaunched as a service called Annotum, powered by WordPress.

What kinds of projects can you imagine building with Google Body or the 3D viewer?

Not surprisingly, the survey of 1,000 adults found that younger people were more likely to use social media than older people for healthcare purposes. Overall, nearly a third of respondents, and 50 percent of those under the age of 35, had used social media for healthcare purposes, which can range from registering a complaint to looking up informational videos on YouTube.

The PwC report concluded that social media would continue to be a factor for healthcare providers and consumers, saying that healthcare is "no longer social media's wallflower." At the same time, however, ambiguous regulations, privacy concerns and a host of other factors all limit how patients and healthcare providers use social media to make decisions.

Facebook (18 percent) was the most popular site for people searching for healthcare information, followed by YouTube (12 percent) and blogs (nine percent).

Yet social media does little to dictate which providers patients choose: just five percent of respondents said they would be swayed to choose one hospital over another because it had a social media presence, compared to the 30 percent who said they would choose a hospital based on its privacy policy.

There are still some barriers keeping big swaths of the healthcare industry on the sidelines when it comes to social media, including what the PwC study called "elusive" FDA guidelines that make it difficult for pharmaceutical companies to use the platform to connect with consumers.

The survey also touched on privacy and security concerns, noting that half of all healthcare organizations had a privacy or security breach within the past year, and the potential for breaches could increase as more companies utilize cloud computing and look for ways to share information amongst different providers.

Those were among the findings in a study released by Healthline Networks for the top searches on its health information site in 2011. Chlamydia was the number one query for mobile device users, while cancer was the top search from desktops and laptops.

The top 10 desktop and laptop searches are more straightforward and include such terms as pain, weight, diet and sleep.

The searches were conducted on the company's Healthline HealthWeb, a healthcare-specific site that links consumers to 50 destination sites including health information publishers, insurers, employers and traditional search engines.

"Personal phones are individually owned whereas desktop computers are usually shared (e.g. among families, co-workers) so people will opt for the search method that gives them the greatest sense of privacy," said Dr. Ash Nadkarni, resident physician in the Department of Psychiatry at Boston Medical Center and founder of Appguppy Mobile, an application creation service.

Among the other findings:

• People were five times more likely to search for diseases than symptoms.
• More mobile traffic andd searches were recorded in March than in any other month, which Healthline was a result of heightened concerns about radiation sickness following the Japanese earthquake.
• Most mobile health searches are made on Wednesday; very few health-related searches are made on weekends.
• The biggest spike in desktop and laptop searches was between Feb. 12 and Feb. 15 when the FDA pulled the breast cancer treatment Avastin and President Barack Obama was discussing the 2012 healthcare budget.

The concept of gamification been has around since at least 2010, but it's new enough in the Web health space that research into its efficacy isn't comprehensive yet. But Dr. Ash Nadkarni, resident physician in the Department of Psychiatry at Boston Medical Center and founder of Appguppy Mobile, an application creation service, said early results are encouraging. Gamification addresses some of the shortcomings of prescription-based therapies, like noncompliance and poor nutritional and fitness education.

Along with Keas, some of the notable players in the growing Web health gamification space include:

Badgeville develops gamification applications across a wide range of interests, with the goal of increasing consumer loyalty to brands. In the health care space one of its bigger success stories has been its role in helping develop Active Trainer, which sends workout reminders to athletes based on a customized training program. The app has helped drive a 300% visitor increase to Active.com.

Innocentive tries to crowd-source solutions to challenges, which often have cash prizes funded by sponsoring organizations. Much like the highly-publicized effort in which gamers competed to successfully produce a model of the AIDS enzyme, many of Innocentive's challenges are health-care related. Current efforts include an $8,000 award from the Foundation for Prader-Willi Research to identify new avenues for research and therapies, as well as a $50,000 challenge to find new ways to preserve whole blood cells for immunological and gene expression studies.

That amounts to more than 30,000 doctors, or twice as many on LinkedIn. The reason doctors shy away from LinkedIn and other mainstream social networks is, unlike Doximity, there are no privacy protections in place that will keep physicians on the right side of patient privacy laws. Previous attempts at a doctor-only social network required physician anonymity, which made it all but useless when it came to make referrals or conferring on a diagnosis.

On Monday, Doximity launched ExpertFinder, a new service the company says will make it easier for doctors to find experts and opt-in to research interviews. The announcement seems to position Doximity as an early leader in the mobile health care device market, which could quadruple to $400 million in annual revenues by 2016.

"Harvard Medical School has two teaching hospitals - Beth Israel Deaconess and Brigham & Women's - that are right across the street from one another," he said. But because they're on different systems and compete with one another, "the big joke is that the fastest way to get a lab report from one hospital to another is by paper airplane."

The first telephone switch was developed for use in hospitals in 1876 and the first pagers were developed for doctors in 1950s. More recently, however, med tech has been "stuck in the 1970's," Tangney said, with doctors still relying on faxes and those pagers that are no longer cutting edge. Much of that is due to HIPAA regulations aimed at insuring patient confidentiality, but they also have hospitals and doctors reluctant to try new ways of communicating and collaborating in both their professional and personal lives.

"For a lot of these guys, Facebook is the F-Word," Tangney said.

Analysts also say that these apps are increasing in price during a period of rising healthcare costs and a significant rise in the number of professional-aged people without health insurance.

These are items that are billed as being for the health and wellbeing of the sick and suffering but are really no more than gimmicks that play into fears about our health and our bodies.

We reported a few weeks ago about the FTC levying fines against two app makers that claimed users could erase their acne using colored lights from the iPHone.

This predication comes on the day of the F8 conference in San Francisco, where many Facebook developers are being encouraged to make "meaningful" apps for the rollout of Timeline on September 29.

Piniewski says young people in the United States are experiencing widespread hopelessness about their employment and insurance prospects for the long term. In part as a result, they are developing habits today that will aim them in very bad directions for their long term well-being. A data-driven realignment of our relationship with health, to move us away from crisis-prompted medical reaction and towards a culture of prevention and self-care, could not only help remake our society here in the United States. It could also help provide models that the developing world, where mobile device penetration is high but processed food consumption is low, could use to leapfrog our own experiences with self-destructive individual and collective behavior.

Many young people today "have very, very low expectations," Piniewski says. "They will be underemployed and underinsured for the rest of their lives." Yet they don't use the healthcare system until they are truly sick, Versel writes. "We have this model that completely misses everything," says Piniewski.

Critics might argue that a strategy based on mobile data tracking is invasive, authoritarian and wrongheaded when individuals should take (sole, individual) responsibility for their own health. There does seem to be some risks to such an approach, but I'd argue that the status quo is hardly a good scenario, either. If a high-tech, health-nut, tracking-obsessed hell is the pot of boiling water we land in when we jump out of an arguably dystopian present, that would certainly be a problem as well.

We write here all the time about data as a platform, about making new parts of life measurable and thus manageable, and about the big potential offered by mobile devices. Piniewski's interview is highly recommended for readers interested in those topics.

Back in 2009, Olanoff and his friend Mike Demers, who also recovered from Hodgkin's, created Blame Drew's Cancer!, a website that aggregated tweets marked with the hashtag #BlameDrewsCancer, which he used as a way of confronting his Hodgkin's lymphoma head on. The meme resonated across the social Web, resulting in a partnership with Lance Armstrong's LIVESTRONG campaign and creating new opportunities to support the struggle against cancer.

Yesterday's launch of I Had Cancer, a full-fledged social network, extends the idea, championed by Olanoff and countless others, that, on the social Web, the people are more important than the platform. Olanoff was not involved in the creation of the site, and he thinks that's "great, because I can use the service like I use any other service."

Mailet Lopez, the creator of I Had Cancer, survived Type 2B breast cancer. After recovering, she "wanted to help the next person who was affected," so she started a blog to chronicle and share her experience. The team at Squeaky Wheel Media picked up her story and approached her, and they built the idea into a social network. The site connects survivors, fighters, and supporters using geography, chronology, and type of cancer. It features a question-based discussion board, as well as a bulletin board called "Dear Cancer," which is reminiscent of Olanoff's "life-hack" of confronting his cancer personally.

Directly or indirectly, cancer affects just about everyone, as does the effort to stop it. Uniting us around a worthy cause is the way Olanoff wants to restore meaning to the word "social." He recommended that we share a link with you to Alex's Lemonade Stand, which is a foundation working to put an end to childhood cancer. You can learn more about Alex's Lemonade Stand and find a link to donate at AlexsLemonade.org.

The app began as a simple appointment reminder system for patients, but it has iterated steadily. It recently added support for billing through insurance providers, media integration for medical charts, speech-to-text transcription, and support for electronic prescriptions throughout the U.S. These features, combined with its clean, easy user interface, could significantly affect the way the health care industry operates.

We've been interested in the use of tablet computers in the health care space since before the iPad even had a name, and since then, we've seen steady improvement in the features and usability of medical apps. Drchrono's certification is a great signal for companies developing this kind of software, not to mention for patients and doctors.

I visited the Artefact office in Seattle last month and was shown the prototype at work on an iPad. The app, as yet unnamed, is designed to help doctors, administrators and patients manage patient care in a hospital. The colorful and eminently usable design is - I can only hope - a pointer to the hospital and doctor apps of the near future.

A picture can tell a thousand words. The image directly below is of the prototype hospital app from Artefact. Below that is a traditional hospital app.

A healthy, attractive app!

An unhealthy hospital app that should be euthanized.

The Artefact app has a dashboard for each patient, showing who the care group is and a chart of that patient's vital signs. Interactive infographics help caregivers understand the patient's health data.

The app employs modern Web design features. For example, there is a rating for each patient, fed by real-time data. Colored up and down arrows display whether the patient's health is trending up or down. It's a relatively simple feature, similar to ratings used in hundreds of 'Web 2.0' sites over the past five to six years. But simplicity is exactly what's needed in hospital apps, which have traditionally been bloated and overly complex. With this prototype app, a doctor or nurse can check the overall status of a patient in one glance. He or she can of course also drill down to the actual data points and check the patient's history.

Taking a cue from the world of social gaming, there is an end goal for the app. The target for each patient is discharge - that is, going home. To help the doctor track the patient's well being, the app has an "estimated discharge" task based system.

The Artefact app is designed to be a decision making tool, while also allowing the sharing of information among hospital staff (such as reports).

The above screenshots show an iPad app, but like any good modern Web app it will cross different devices. According to Artefact, while doctors will probably use tablets at the patient's bedside, unit coordinators may use their desktop PCs to see the status of patients and make plans for them.

Anything that simplifies hospital care and removes the need for complex medical apps is a great advance forward in health technology. Let's hope this is indeed the future of hospital apps.

Google says it's shutting down the projects because they got very little traction but health industry tech innovators say that Google Health may have been ahead of its time, did a poor job reaching out to a now growing ecosystem of developers and ought to be put on slow life support or open sourced instead of being shut down. When it comes to patient-centric cloud-based electronic health records, the opportunity remains large, the need severe but the challenges are substantial.

What it Means to Lose Google Health

Medical information heavy-hitter John D. Halamka MD says Google Health was a real trailblazer in its time. Dr. Halamka is the Chief Information Officer (CIO) of Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, the CIO and Dean for Technology at Harvard Medical School, the Chairman of the New England Health Electronic Data Interchange Network (NEHEN), CEO of MA-SHARE (the Regional Health Information Organization), Chair of the US Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP) and a practicing Emergency Physician.

"Google Health is truly innovative and broke new ground when it created interfaces to hospitals, labs, and pharmacies in 2008," Halamka wrote today on his blog. "I was there at the beginning and can definitively state that it was Google's reputation and vision that broke down the political barriers keeping data from patients...Google Health [still] has the best user interface, feature set, and ease of use of all the stand alone personal health records." (It should be noted that Israel Deaconess Medical, one of Dr. Halamka's employers, was one of Google Health's launch partners.)

Halamka says Google Health "really moved the industry" but other observers express disappointment that the project barely got out of the starting gate.

"It will take someone the size of Google and not in the health space to create something that's more standardized in the health space, where everything is so proprietary and money driven," says Shwen Gwee, founder of the blog Med 2.0.

"Unfortunately, it's always been Google's philosophy to fail fast and cut off the arm that isn't doing any work. Early adopters were interested in using Google Health, but it took too long to move. I wonder what would happen if they launched it now, with everything that's coming out around open and standardized data. I wish they would donate the platform, open source it, issue a challenge or something, and see what others could do with it."

The request that the Google Health platform be open sourced is something we heard from multiple industry players. People feel burned by the loss of a big opportunity due to the impatience of a big, slow company.

"Google is cutting and running too early from Google Health..in the long term I believe this to be a big mistake," says Mark Scrimshire, co-founder of the HealthCamp Foundation, an organization that puts on events around the world to hack on the future of healthcare.

"Health was always a long term play. An industry mired in regulation and conservative approaches, things were never going to change quickly. However, momentum is building. We are [now] seeing a tremendous uptick in innovations that make use of Government Health Data [for example].

"Personally, I still use Google Health on a daily basis. My Fitbit and numerous other health related data sources feed in to Google Health and pass data out to other services like Keas.com [a workplace wellness program]. I recently moved my Pharmacy because I could have my data automatically piped in to Google Health.

Right: HealthCamp's Mr. Scrimshire, before and after using Google Health.

"Google Health - what we call an untethered Personal Health Record - was NOT a destination in and of itself. Instead it was more useful as a conduit through which we could channel our health data.

"As Meaningful Use requirements kick in as a result of the implementation of the Affordable Care Act we can expect to see Patient Portals popping up like daisies and consequently a growing need to provide a place that Patients can bring together all these disparate data sources in order to get a comprehensive view of their Health. It is not happening yet, but expect to see changes happening in 2012 and people starting to look for solutions to help them get their arms around their health data. The problem for Google will be that by cutting and running now who will trust them in the future if they decide to come back to the table?"

A spokesperson for Google declined an offer to respond to any of the issues raised in this article prior to publication, saying the company preferred that its announcement today speak for itself.

Why Did Google Health Fail to Gain More Traction?

There are many different theories about why Google Health didn't grow faster.

"As much as there's a massive consumer-empowerment movement, in order to get ongoing and broad adoption of something in healthcare, one needs to lead with the clinicians. Take a look at ZocDoc, for example. They are having success with appointment scheduling by leading with doctors/dentists who then, in turn, bring in their patients. Without provider adoption first, they would have had limited success with consumers."

Matthew Holt, Co-Chair of the organization the Health 2.0 Network says he thinks insurance companies were in part to blame. "Google became disappointed when they found out how hard it was to get Insurance agencies to share their data voluntarily," Holt says. "They made some progress but not enough."

The most common critique we heard though was of Google Health's work with tech developers.

Healthcare blogger Faisal Qureshi said on Twitter this afternoon, "Google Health failed at not reaching out to vertical developers, Android fixation & not learning how MSFT partners."

Brian Ahier, a hospital IT evangelist in Oregon echos that sentiment:

"While Microsoft has assembled a list of companies that make products (glucometers, blood pressure monitors, etc.) and offered software that pulls in data from hospitals and labs, compatible with their HealthVault product, Google has made little to no headway in this area.

"I remember a few years back Google did fairly well when compared to Microsoft but HealthVault has continued to mature and Google has been stalled for some time."

Ahier says that Google's decision to pull the plug on Google Health will ultimately be a bad thing for the whole industry.

We spoke to a number of people who agreed that Google launched a stronger health data product than Microsoft, but that Microsoft's HealthVault has since surpassed Google Health.

"The problem with Google Health is that it offers no incentive to use it, it positioned itself as a data repository and not much else," says Brian Dolan, Editor of MobileHealthNews. "Some of the other consumer apps and devices are filling the gaps and they have their own back end systems and APIs, they're all sharing with each other. These other sticky consumer health apps are driving uptake and driving adoptions."

One of those startups and a platform in-and-of itself is Boston-based fitness tracking service Runkeeper. Founder Jason Jacobs says of Google Health's closure,

"Sensors are starting to proliferate across categories, but someone still needs to tie this data together and provide the users a holistic view. Google's vision for data aggregation and the good that can come from it was right, but data aggregation isn't the only piece, the consumer-facing system that people love has to be there. And that is the hardest part.

"Google was a pioneer in many ways with Google Health, and helped turn people on to the need to solve the problem of health data fragmentation. While they may not have achieved the consumer adoption they were hoping for, someone is going to crack the consumer nut in health in a Facebook-like way, and the world will be better off for it."

Or, as RunKeeper's @HealthGraphAPI Twitter account said upon learning the news, "Don't worry folks, we'll take it from here..."

Surely someone will take it from here, right?

For the healthy among us, these sorts of status updates serve as a good reminder of who we should steer clear of. But at a larger scale, this social data can give other warnings about where diseases clusters are occurring. And unlike the sorts of statistics released by the Center for Disease Control, this social data can be tracked in real-time.

That's the aim of a new startup called Sickweather. The company, which is still in private beta, wants to track the signs of sickness via social networks and generate maps so that people can determine who and where to avoid.

Sickweather wants to build a social network around this sort of information, but currently the startup is utilizing publicly available social data. By mining Facebook and Twitter for certain keywords, the company can ascertain where there are disease outbreaks.

Sickweather isn't the only company thinking about the ways in which our online data can be utilized to track illness. Earlier this week, Google noted that it was monitoring search patterns around Dengue Fever in order to track the spread of the virus.

Google says that it wants to be able to build an "early warning system" of sorts, and Sickweather's aims are similar, but usese social rather than search information. The startup insists that the publicly available data it's using right now is anonymized, and the company promises privacy protection as well. Tweeting that you're staying home from work because of a wicked cough doesn't mean that Sickweather will point to you as the vector or that it will offer any particular diagnosis about what illness you have. But taken with other people's updates, also complaining about similar symptoms, the company's algorithm will be able to pinpoint places to avoid.

The company plans to build out a number of apps for Facebook and Twitter as well as for mobile devices. Through these the company plans to offer different levels of access to data, from just being able to view generalized maps of flu outbreaks, for example, to more details about specifics and, as is the case with most social networks, to be able to share these with only certain friends and followers.

Privacy Concerns?

On one hand, Sickweather might raise some questions about medical privacy - do people want to be able to share this sort of personal information? But as the frequent Twitter and Facebook updates about illness demonstrate, people are already doing this. Sickweather hopes to be able to make better use of this information - at both an aggregate level, for certain cities for example, but also for people's own social networks.

The tricorder, for the non-geek reader of ReadWriteWeb (is there such at thing?) is the handheld computer used by medical professionals and science officers to do non-invasive scanning on the Star Trek television shows. The prize will focus on the medical applications of this fictional device.

The X-Prize Foundation has become renowned for inspiring breakthroughs that make scfi a reality while solving real-world problems. X-Prizes have so far been awarded for the first "private, suborbital space flight;" for the first car to exceed 100 miles per gallon and for advances in advanced rocketry.

Other active prizes include one for sending a functional robot to the moon and another for a next-generation oil cleanup technology.

TOS tricorder photo by Mike Seyfang, TNG tricorder photo by Bobbie Johnson | other sources: Forbes

Health BodyMaps is an exhaustive set of searchable body maps - think Gray's Anatomy meets CT scan. It comes with a library of medical and treatment knowledge, but the central focus of the tool are the colored, interactive maps of everything from the pancreas to the digestive system to the body as a whole.

Choosing either a male or female body, the user can mouse over parts of the figure, then click to get information on body parts, which includes text but also a 360-degree animation of the part, say a shoulder or knee. Above the central frame, in a row of slides, different aspects of the figure or body part (muscular, skeletal, etc.) can be accessed by a click. Above the figure you can also navigate by search term.

In the right-hand column you can navigate to a symptom search engine, which leads you to possible causes, many of which have 3D graphics; to a doctor-finder; or to a treatment search.

One of the most compelling aspects, beside the graphic quality and workable 3D, is the ability of a user to share a body view, with email or by posting or sharing on social media. Unfortunately there is no news on apps for smart phones and tablets.

The project was a collaboration between Healthline, a consumer health information company, and GE Healthymagination, a Web platform for health-focused projects.

Other sources: Technology Review