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.

While we love this fact when it comes to political discourse and daily musings, health and medicine are a different game, which is why we're sure to appreciate Google's latest offering - medication listings in search results.

As Greg Sterling writes, Google first "began integrating structured health-related content at the top of search results" last year as a way to provide authoritative and reliable answers to health-related searches.

That same functionality is expanding today to searches for both name brand and generic medications, with the result summarly linking to information as provided by the National Institutes of Health.

The summary, which is offered at the top of the search results, offers a quick summary of the drug along with quick links to commonly-sought information such as side effects, precautions, dietary instructions and how to take it. According to Sterling, the feature is currently only available in the U.S. and Google declined to say whether or not it would expand to other countries.

One of the interesting trends highlighted in the report was the rise of "niche therapies", which Web technology is helping to enable. The report notes that "while mass media campaigns were successful in raising awareness of conditions of interest to a broad base of individuals, promoting niche drugs requires precision targeting and fostering one-to-one relationships with patients." This is where the Web has come into play - in particular social media, search marketing and behavioral targeted advertising.

The report states that healthcare companies are starting to experiment with online video and other rich media promotion, although it also warns that the regulatory challenges inherent in the healthcare system apply to new media too.

How are web technologies being used by Pharmaceutical companies? They are using social networks like Facebook, advertising on niche health blogs, creating YouTube channels, and monitoring content online (e.g. Wikipedia). Also, the report notes that "a growing number of patients are rating prescription drugs and treatments on sites like iGuard.org, DailyStrength.org, PatientsLikeMe, and WebMD." For example, the report states that there are currently almost nine thousand reviews of Zoloft and over five and a half thousand reviews of Seroquel on the site DailyStrength.org.

Another emerging trend is use of mobile. The report says that consumers who use their cell phones and PDA/smartphones to look up health and medical information is now at over 10 million U.S. adults.

Already well funded by undisclosed investors, Raskin says the company, called Massive Health, will bring a User Experience designer's sensibility to healthcare. "With health-case costs rising faster than inflation, a crisis is on the horizon," he writes in a blog post announcing the move. "We need to apply cognitive psychology, the principles of design, and tighter feedback loops to our own health. Health care needs to have its design Renaissance, where products and services are redesigned to be responsive to human needs and considerate of human frailties."

A frequent and fascinating public speaker, Raskin's efforts to move into the much maligned health care sector could really shake things up. His move was first reported on TechCrunch, where Erick Schonfeld says they'll be watching Massive Health closely once it launches. We'll try to follow it more closely, here at ReadWriteWeb.

See also: Your Memories Will Be Rewritten: Mozilla's Raskin Says Product Placement is Coming Soon to Your Facebook Photos

Integrate Your Stuff Here

Krasner cited MyCareTeam, a third party diabetes management application which she says is using Google Health to "to integrate their stuff into our repository for health records."

According to the press release in May about this integration, the MyCareTeam product allows users to transfer their glucose readings, lab values, medication, and other information from their software into their Google Health accounts. It is mostly a manual process, however Krasner pointed out that users can upload their data "automatically using LifeScan OneTouch meters". She admitted though that Google is "still in the very early stages, so these services are still growing and developing."

Online Health Constraints

The issue with moving health records online though is that there is a lot of rules and regulations to contend with. However Tenderich asked Krasner why Google isn't doing more, for example by offering a secure messaging system to allow patients to discuss their health issues with their doctors. Krasner's reply shows how this is too much of a red tape jungle for even the mighty Google to overcome:

"This goes back to the health records platform model. We're not in the business of offering secure messaging back and forth with doctors. What we're doing is giving people options to use great services that do offer that functionality.

For example, we integrate with web sites from the big retail pharmacy chains and provider sites like CVS, Walgreens and Quest Diagnostics labs. You can't order refills directly through Google Health, but you can import your prescription history, and you can send data back to the pharmacies via their sites."

So users have to leave the Google Health site when they need to make a medical transaction or even communicate securely with health professionals.

Business Model? Pffft, Search!

Luckily, Google Health's business model isn't reliant on any sophisticated online health technology. What is the business model? Why, sending Google Health users to Google's search property of course!

Kraser admitted that "there is no direct monetization model for Google Health", rather their model "is simply that when people sign up, it tends to encourage users to do more searches on Google.com. That's where we make our money. Every page of Google Health has [a] search box on the side. If you click on it, it takes you out to Google.com."

But "none of your health data goes with [it]", she assured.

So it's slow progress in the online health world, if Google Health is anything to go by. The good news though is that it allows smaller more health-focused startups, like MyCareTeam, to create innovative applications and hook them into Google Health, Microsoft Healthvault, and other bigco initiatives - using APIs and the platforms the big companies are able to offer.

Click here for a good cause: Ask Google for a World Diabetes Day Doodle

According to the HHS, the program is "a public-private collaboration that is encouraging innovators to utilize community health data to develop applications that help raise awareness of community health performance and spark action to improve health." At today's event a number organizations are demonstrating a preview of their work with the data, including Google, Microsoft and GE.

First Results

• Google: The company imported the public data into Google Fusion Tables where it can be explored and visualized.
• Microsoft Bing: "Using community health data, Bing has created new features that allow easier selection of hospitals based on patient quality of care ratings and new ways to assess potential areas to live based on a combination of community health measures and access to goods and services."
• The Network of Care for Healthy Communities: A Web portal combined with community health data provides officials with policy information, local services, best practices and evaluation tools that can spur local action.
• Community Clash: Created by MeYou Health, "Community Clash is an online card game that engages you in a discovery of your community's health and well-being status and how it compares to other communities in a head-to-head clash. Community Clash gets personal, prompting each player to compare his or her own Well-Being Score and encourage social comparison with friends through Facebook integration."

Opportunities

• Data mashups: Sharing information across data sets and regions will create multiple opportunities. Will there be a management system in place to fix or enhance data sets and their underlying models as needed?


• Services engine: There are a mix of CSV, XML, map data, and other sources available in the data set. Will the sets be offered as APIs and how it will be leveraged across different parties?


• Missing gaps: Will the community health data initiative spawn new areas of research funding?


• Public and private: What will be the focus of private companies that offer services based on this initiative? Will it attract VCs and investors outside of the public sphere?

"Twelve months ago," Jane Sarasohn-Kahn said, "the most important things on American voters' minds were the war and health care. Two days ago, the most important thing on American voters' minds is the economy. Health care and the war have taken a backseat."

This doesn't mean however, that health care plays second fiddle to the attendees of the Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco this week - it's still their driving force. The rules of engagement however, as Clay Shirky pointed out in his keynote on Wednesday, are changing.

Additionally, the financial meltdown is aggravating an already weak health system as people forgo or postpone essential health care due to loss of insurance or inability to pay.

The answer, according to the survey, is engagement: "Effective health engagement can build trust, and conversely, trust is the key to deeper engagement," said Nancy Turett (Edelman).

While the Edelman study serves as a basic guide, the leading providers of health information services have also been monitoring and implementing changes.

WebMD and Aetna

Wayne Gattinella (CEO WebMD), pointed out that health on the Web is no longer only for the electronic literate, a fact that demonstrates the power of electronic information. "Additionally, health care is not only about personal issues anymore," he said, "but financial as well. Patients want to know how to reduce out-of-pocket costs; they want more information."

Mark Bertolini (President, Aetna), said the company is hoping to help customers improve communications with their health insurance providers by giving them the option to transfer their personal health records to Microsoft's HealthVault - "our main focus is on portability," he said.

The Big (Internet) 3 - Microsoft, Google, Yahoo

Of course, the big three - Microsoft, Google and Yahoo - have plans of their own.

Microsoft, according to Peter Neupert (Corporate VP, Microsoft HSG) is focused on making HealthVault, a platform that allows providers to look at patient information [with their consent], easier to use for physicians and consumers.

Roni Zeiger, (Product Manager, Google Health) told the audience that the most important thing they've been hearing is "we want our data," since the launch of Google Health, a site that allows people to store health information. "This is incredibly hard," he explained, "people want data, but they also want two more things: it must be easy, and it must be useful."

Michael Yang (VP & GM Yahoo! Health), said that the biggest changes in the past year are awareness and recognition: "It's amazing to see how much demand there is for health."

While these five companies are paving the way to make personal health records available on the Web, the question remains whether we as a society can get used to the idea.

What do you think?

ComputerWorld's Matt Hamblen wrote about medical, legal and other professional use of the iPad today as well. Hamblen writes that doctors like the device's unobtrusive size and unintimidating profile in patient care, but wish that it had Bluetooth support. Easy access to electronic health records is the device's most compelling quality, something Mike Kirkwood wrote about in depth here on ReadWriteWeb before the iPad launched. (The Healthcare System: An Apple Tablet's Biggest Opportunity)

At least as interesting are the Hitwise numbers about percentage of traffic driven by search to sites in various categories. Health and Medical sites get 44% of their traffic from search engines, 29% from Google alone, says Hitwise. The lowest category for search traffic is Business and Financial sites, where only 17% of traffic is from search, 10% from Google. That category, though, is also the one seeing the biggest growth in search traffic - up 21% year over year, with Google's search traffic to these sites up a whopping 30%.

Entertainment and Travel both saw big growth in search traffic over the last year as well (see chart, click for full chart with additional columns), while Health and Medical and Shopping and Classifieds saw search traffic grow the least.

Take-aways for me are that the world of Business search optimization and ad buying must be going strong and Health and Medical are probably search-saturated. How else would you read this chart?

More Noise to Signal.

According to the Wikipedia blog, the 2009 swine flu pandemic page "got about 16,000 page hits on April 23, and this number increased to a dizzying 2.86 million page hits only a week later." The article began as a mere stub and has since expanded to a 21 page article with multiple iterations and discussions.

The NIH is the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' primary agency for conducting and supporting medical research. Contributions from the group will likely help dispel myth from fact and increase awareness for early detection and preventative health.

In the past, a number of media stories from the American Medical News, Reuters Health and Seattle's KOMO TV News have criticized Wikipedia for its lack of credibility. There have also been a number of breakaway efforts to recreate the Wikipedia experience amongst subject experts including Toxipedia, Medpedia and Citizendium. Nevertheless, with Wikipedia's monthly unique traffic of 300 million visitors, it simply makes more sense for medical experts to travel to an information epicenter rather than asking millions to modify their behavior.

While no responsible medical professional would ever suggest Wikipedia as the sole information source for self-diagnosis and treatment, the NIH's recognition of Wikipedia's value might spur on other agencies to consider the site in health outreach strategies.

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.

Microsoft has bought Medstory because it's an "intelligent" and "intuitive search technology". The NY Times says that Medstory's "search software applies artificial intelligence techniques to medical and health information in medical journals, government documents and on the Internet."

This acquisition follows Microsoft's purchase last July of "health-intelligence" vendor Azyxxi. Mary Jo Foley is also reporting that Microsoft's Health Strategy group "has been building "Windows Live Healthcare" offerings, some of which could be free and ad-supported, and others of which could be paid and subscription-based."

While the web-based health industry is a potentially huge market (just ask Jim Clark of Netscape and Healtheon fame), which probably is the main reason for Microsoft's interest in it, an equally valid reason could be that Microsoft wants to corner the vertical search engine niche for health - before Google gets to it.

What is Holding People Back?

According to Erika S. Fishman, Manhattan Research's Director of Research, besides privacy concerns, one of the biggest hurdles to overcome for the adoption of PHR is a lack of motivation among Americans to use these records unless faced with live threatening illnesses.

Meredith Abreu Ress, Manhattan Research's VP of Research, also doesn't expect to see PHRs to take off this year. As she points out, its hard to see what would motivate patients to curate their own health records when most doctors still have "your entire medical history in a coffee-stained manila folder."

Obama: Electronic Health Records for All Americans

As Greg Sterling pointed out over a year ago, the success of PHRs will be "tied in to the political outcome of universal healthcare initiatives." President-elect Obama has made electronic health records a cornerstone of his administration's proposed health policy, but some groups are already voicing concerns about the privacy implications of creating electronic medical records for all American.

According to CNN, in American, only about 8% of hospitals and 17% of physicians keep electronic records of the kind that Obama envisions and that President Bush also proposed in 2006. The administration hopes to make all medical records available in electronic form by 2014.

CC-licensed Image of 'health card' courtesy of Flickr user juhansonin.

As we shall see, the two tech rivals - Google and Microsoft - have much in common when it comes to their online health apps.

As with Google Health, Microsoft is essentially building a platform for other, smaller services to tap into. Neither bigco wants to get involved in the tricky world of health records compliance and prescription. Both are encouraging more specialized health-focused services to do that legwork - and Google and Microsoft will provide the tech infrastructure and focus on ordinary users.

Like Google, Microsoft is emphasizing that it's still early stages in this market. Said Keith Toussaint:

"We knew going in that introducing a new type of consumer health solution is a long-term endeavor; we have to be in this for the long haul. Health is, as you know, a HUGE ecosystem -- trillions of dollars, hundreds of millions of consumers/patients, hundreds of thousands of physicians, thousands of hospitals, hundreds of insurance plans and so on. We also knew the greatest value of HealthVault to consumers will come when we can offer connectivity throughout the health ecosystem and give people the ability to use their personal health information in a wide range of health and wellness applications and share it with the providers and plans of their choice. We're still in the early phases of developing the HealthVault ecosystem but we're making great progress."

Toussaint admitted they are essentially competing with Google "to find the best developers" for their HealthVault platform, but that "we're not in some kind of hot market share battle now because it's so early."

Indeed Toussaint used the comparison of Coke and Pepsi to illustrate their nascent competition with Google:

"Leading hospitals like Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center are actually integrating their systems with both us and Google -- because some people like one or the other. It's a Coke or Pepsi thing. And why not program with both? It's fine as far as we're concerned; this whole space is still so small, and has such huge potential, that we can both grow huge and succeed without bumping heads. Later on, head-to-head competition will probably be more important."

So it seems that it's difficult to 'taste the difference' between HealthVault and Google Health. They are both platforms, neither tries to be a healthcare provider or conduit between healthcare professionals and patients, and both have search as their business model. There are differences in the two services when you drill down, but at a high level they're very similar.

Let us know if you've used either system and if so what your experience has been.

Image credit: Senor Adventure