ReadWriteWeb

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.

"The United States is far behind other countries when it comes to health care," Deb Levine (Founder, ISIS), told the audience this week at the Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, CA.

"One of the United Nations development mandates is to use Information and Communication Technology (ICT) as much as possible to move countries forward in their development. [But] because of the economic split in the U.S. between the small percentage of ultra wealthy and the large numbers of folks in need, Americans need ICT for health care just like folks in Africa, Asia and Latin America," she said.

In the middle of one of the worst economic crises experienced by the US, Health 2.0 Advisor Jane Sarasohn-Kahn confirmed today that US citizens are not as focused on heath care as they were a year ago.

"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.

Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, considers Health 2.0 to be the new economics of aggregation - both information and people.

Speaking to a standing-room-only audience at the Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco this morning, Shirky explained that in going forward, we must focus on three things: information, co-ordination and collaboration. The idea expands on his recent article Health Information Technology: A Few Years Of Magical Thinking? (with Carol Diamond), which warns the health care IT establishment against the dangers of "magical thinking."