One of the most popular sessions was 'Transforming Hospital Systems: The Digital Future of Healthcare'.

The speakers were Michael Kennedy, an Info systems guy at Microsoft specializing in hospital and insurance systems, and Gregg Lucksinger, Chief Medical Officer of Red River Family Practice and Central Texas Clinical Research. Dr. Lucksinger opened with a case study of how Electronic Medical Records have helped his practice. Helped save time, save money, reduce mistakes, etc. It's not too hard of a case to make in theory. Your bank uses electronic records to streamline your banking, why should your doctors have to mail each other libraries of paper files? Of course the devil is in the details, particularly those involving implementation.

SXSW health care session

Michael Kennedy noted that Microsoft is getting into health care big time. According to Kennedy, Microsoft's health care staff now tops 600 full time employees. Much of the work focuses on tying electronic medical records to hospital systems. Not surprisingly, most of the growth is in foreign markets where things don't need to be "retro-fitted" to engage "legacy systems", but can be dropped in from scratch.

Microsoft's Healthvault

All of this is old hat in healthcare circles and received limited yawns and polite nods of ascent in the session. Things got interesting when Kennedy described Microsoft's Personal Health Record product, Healthvault.

Basic primer: Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) are for doctors and hospitals, insurance companies and employers. They contain things like codes for drugs, tests and procedures - i.e. data. Personal Health Records, on the other hand, are accessible to individual patients. They are a higher level description that people can understand themselves and share with others - i.e. information rather than data. Microsoft's Healthvault places them squarely in the consumer market. It's the plumbing that ties together devices and services meant for individuals. Add to that Google Health, another recent Big Internet Co entry into the same space, and it's easy to see why the session was standing room only and the line for Q&A stretched almost out the door.

Kennedy noted that things were still early, still in roll out mode for both Microsoft and Google, but he mentioned enough current consumer devices and applications to create buzz.

Health 2.0 Devices and Apps

First up, watches from Polar that monitor your heart rate and write the information to your Personal Health Record:

Imagine sharing trends from your workout sessions with your doctor health coach or personal trainer. Same thing with a scale from A&D Medical:

A pedometer from OMRON:

The more traditional medical devices, like blood pressure monitors from OMRON:

A wrist-worn blood pressure unit from Microlife, and a blood glucose meter from Johnson & Johnson's LifeScan:

Okay, so the above are some cool devices. Is anyone making slick apps to sit on top of those devices? Check out the American Heart Association's Blood Pressure Management Center, which gives a slick visualization and makes it easy to see your blood pressure trends over time:

Maybe you're an athlete. How about software from Peaksware? Training Peaks is for the workout junky, while Fitness Peaks is more for the person interested in being generally fit.

Trends

So what does all of this mean? Firstly, these devices and apps help people become experts in their health and well-being. Individuals gather their data - blood pressure, glucose, heart rate, weight, workout session and nutritional information, etc - then use the apps to learn about themselves over time.

Second, portability. Tracking your weight, blood pressure and workout info over time isn't new. The problem was that every product lived in its own silo. The offerings from Microsoft and Google break down these walled gardens, creating rich data assets for personal lifelong care, from their interaction with a given product.

Perhaps more importantly, granting people a 360 degree view of themselves - how does taking a walk affect your own blood pressure and glucose?

Finally, personal responsibility. Health care is about behavior change - about people taking control of their own health and well-being. Right now everybody has your data but you. Your doctor, your employer and your insurance company have the information and the tools. But that data is lost every time you move, switch doctors, switch jobs or insurance companies. Ironically, the person who has the greatest chance of impacting your health behaviors (you), has virtually no access to information and tools to do so. But the above apps are changing that, creating access and portability that give you the power to take control of your own health and well-being.

Written by Joshua Rosenthal, Ph.D., founder of www.Sprigley.com

hCard: Providing Your Contact Information

Users are tired of repeatedly entering profile information over and over again. This problem is solved by the microformat hCard. Leslie Chicoine, an Experience Designer at Get Satisfaction, talked about how her company had created a sign up process for their web application using hCard. (see screen shot below)

XFN & FOAF: Who are your contacts

Another microformat, XFN, and the FOAF project are techniques for embedding relationships in links. This allows social networks to recommend contacts that should be shared, without scraping web based email clients. Recently, Google introduced a Social Graph API, which "index[es] the public Web for XHTML Friends Network (XFN), Friend of a Friend (FOAF) markup and other publicly declared connections".

Something very interesting that I wasn't aware of until today's panel was that both Plaxo & Six Apart were working on something similar before Google announced OpenSocial, according to Joe Smarr and David Recordon. However, once Google started focusing on this they were happy to hand it over to them - because Google "has the web on a hard drive", so it makes the crawling component of this far less difficult. For a good overview on Google's Social Graph API, check out the following introductory video:

OpenID: Authenticating Individuals

OpenID is a decentralized framework for allowing social networks (and other web applications) to authenticate users. In other words, it lets users login using shared credentials across different services. It also allows individuals to decide what information they want to share with each application. For example, a user might decide not to provide their postal or email address.

OAuth: Authorizing Access

The final protocol discussed was OAuth. It is a protocol that is less about authentication (OpenID) and more about authorization. The protocol has been developed over the last year. The specification was released in December 2007 and modeled off a number of authorization protocols, including the Flickr Authorization protocol. According to Chris Messina, a number of services have already started using it including:

• Fireeagle
• Open Social
• Pownce
• Get Satisfcation, and
• Magnolia
• (and Twitter support will be coming soon)

Chris also pointed to a comment in a recent post of ours about email passwords, that highlighted the need for tools like these. Also there was a comment on RWW from Oren Michels at Mashery, indicating it is the most requested feature for them right now.

Conclusion

Securely moving your data around the web has increasingly become an important concept on the web. Arguably, it was the most discussed meme at this year's SXSW. While not an application, you could say it has been 'this year's Twitter'.

The Data Portability group deserves credit for educating the market. Beyond that, it is also an idea whose time has clearly come. It is interesting to think what applications will be built on top of these portability standards - they might be popular by next year's SXSW!

Lesson 1: Ignore The Great Unknown

Jason started his presentation talking about "the great unknown," which he defined as the things that hang over every entrepreneur's head when they are starting a company. For example, "what about when we have 1M customers or 100 employees." Jason encouraged people to ignore these concerns and focus on the now. He pointed out that often as entrepreneurs, we worry about the impact of our decisions rather than just making the right decision. He asserted that this is crazy, because decisions made today don't have to last forever - we "must optimize for today."

Lesson 2: Watch Out for Red Flags

The next point was about interpersonal dynamics in the workplace and watching out for what he called 'red flags.' Red flags are basically words or phrases that end up causing problems in communications. For example, at 37 Signals they learned to be careful with the words: need, can't, easy, only, and fast. For example saying, how easy someone else's job is or that they can't ship a product without one feature.

Lesson 3: Be Successful and Make Money by Helping Other People be Successful and Make Money

He talked about the powerful reaction people had to Basecamp when they first released it (Basecamp is a very lightweight project management tool). They realized this was because the tool was helping other people do their job better. This has become part of their philosophy, looking for opportunities in the marketplace to "spot chain reactions and be the catalyst" around helping others.

Lesson 4: Target Nonconsumers and Nonconsumption

This is actually a concept that Jason borrowed from Clayton Christensen (a famous professor at Harvard Business School) in the books Innovators Dilemma and Innovators Solution. The idea is that there exists an entire market of nonconsumers, or people who have a need but existing players aren't targeting these people. The advantage of targeting this segment is that you minimize the chance for competition from entrenched players.

Lesson 5: Question Your Work Regularly

At 37 Signals, Jason reported they are always asking questions to make sure they are doing the right things. Internally, this list of questions includes:

• why are we doing this?
• what problem are we solving?
• is this actually useful?
• are we adding value?
• will this change behavior?
• is there an easier way?
• what's the opportunity cost?
• is it really worth it?

Lesson 6: Read your Product

Given the firm's background, this was a lesson I found particularly interesting. Jason claimed that the "Biggest sin on the internet right now is bad copywriting ... paying too much attention to pixels and not enough attention to words." Beyond this he pointed out that words are actually less expensive to correct and improved copy will make doing the design second result in a stronger design.

Lesson 7: Err on the Side of Simple

As surprising as I found the last lesson, this one was probably the most obvious given 37 Signal's business. Jason pointed out that you should always "start with the easy way." The interesting and non-obvious point was that he extended this beyond product issues. For example, he recommended people start a company by setting up an LLC, until they need a C Corp.

Lesson 8: Invest in What Doesn't Change

Jason said that this is the "best business advice he's gotten in some time." It interesting because this isn't something that is intuitive, when you think about tech companies which tend to be focused on what is new and upcoming. However, Jason pointed out that principals can last. For example at 37 Signals, he said they anticipate in 10 years "simple, affordable software" will still be worth investing in.

Lesson 9: Follow the Chefs

Jason called chefs the smartest business professionals. He explained this is because they are aware that you become famous and successful by giving knowledge away. For example, chefs have cooking shows and write cook books. Yet it doesn't stop their restaurants from being successful. In fact, he claimed they are probably more successful because of their sharing.

Lesson 10: Interruption is the Enemy of Productivity

Originally David Heinemeier Hansson (Jason's partner) and Jason didn't live in the same city. They eagerly awaited David moving to Chicago and being able to get even more done. Interestingly, when David arrived they actually found productivity decreasing. At 37 Signals, they have come to believe that this was due to the increased interruptions; and so they ended up favoring passive communication like email versus things that are more instantaneous but also interrupt your workflow.

Lesson 11: Road Maps Send You in the Wrong Direction

When talking about business plans, financial projections, or features for products 37Signals believes road maps are bad, because "they lock you into the past." The only exception is APIs, because people are counting on it. Instead he said your expectation should be "do the right thing at the right time."

Lesson 12: Be Clear in Crisis

At the beginning of this year, 37 Signals had some infrastructure problems that resulted in a few hours of unscheduled downtime. This was widely discussed on the internet. They quickly posted about what had happened and during the technical problems kept they the homepage updated with status messages. Through this experience, it reinforced their belief that people love you even more if you are open, honest, public and responsive during a crisis.

Lesson 13: Make Tiny Decisions

Rather than trying to make major decisions, when possible, Jason encouraged entrepreneurs to break problems down to the atomic level. In web properties, this is especially powerful because they've been able to break features down to the atomic level and then launch them one at a time. This is good because the team can gain momentum and celebrate little launches. However, it's also good because "when you make tiny decisions, you can't make big mistakes."

Lesson 14: Make it Matter

Jason ended his presentation by encouraging the audience to make sure their work was significant. He talked about how meaningful he felt the products they were creating were for individuals. Before opening it up for questions, he said that "everything you do should matter."

Conclusion

One of the things I love most about SXSW is the transparency with which so many leaders share about their business. At last year's festival, two of my favorite panels were: Web App Autopsy and The Figures Behind the Top Web Apps.

We'd love to hear any good case studies or lessons you've learned running startups or in business. Please share them in the comments below.

Here's the comic the Bitstrip editors did for us:

Bitstrip is rolling out a major upgrade tonight, in preparation for tomorrow's "pre-launch" at SXSW - where they will send beta invites to hundreds of SXSWers. They also plan to "comic blog" the SXSW event.

What do you think? Will Bitstrip be the Breakout App we're all looking for?