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They're not Facebook-like numbers just yet, but after just seven months Doximity has signed up about one out of every 20 U.S. physicians for its LinkedIn-like networking service.

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.

The iTunes app store will contain just over 13,000 healthcare-related apps by 2012, a sign that the caring and treatment for the sick - or even those fearing they are sick - is moving to the mobile device.

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.

On October 1, 2013, the US Deptment of Health and Human Services will expect all of America's health care providers to have transitioned their business bookkeeping and transaction records to the latest World Health Organization (WHO) standards. Although the latest set of the so-called ICD codes (International Classification of Diseases), called ICD-10, were rolled out in 1992, a study by the Medical Group Management Association estimates that the cost for each U.S. hospital simply to change its forms and retrain its office managers could exceed $2 million.

Why the change? The term "disease" has been stretched somewhat since the ICD was first implemented after World War II. Now the system is being used to classify every kind of conceivable ailment; and now healthcare professionals and office managers are being expected to comprehend a system of codes that has expanded from just over 10,000 classifications (ICD-9) to potentially over 140,000 (ICD-10).

With a victory that was certainly commendable but not really all that surprising, IBM's supercomputer Watson successfully finished the three-day Jeopardy tournament last night by beating its human competitors by a whopping $50,000. A victory for artificial intelligence and computer science. Scrawled at the bottom of his final Jeopardy response, Jennings quipped "I for one welcome our new computer overlords."

Today, IBM announced its post-Jeopardy plans for our new overlords: healthcare.

Social media in the diabetes sphere is exploding, and patients are actually using online venues as one of their first lines of defense after diagnosis - and even years after their initial diagnosis. Logging online hours is becoming as important as getting in to see your endocrinologist these days.

When I was diagnosed with diabetes, I spent two weeks in the hospital learning how to give injections to defenseless oranges. After those two weeks were up, my parents and I were given prescriptions for insulin, test strips, a glucose meter, and a book about meal planning. And we were then thrust into the world of managing type 1 diabetes all on our own.

Breastcancer.org has released a free mobile app to help patients research and understand their breast cancer pathology reports. The tool is meant to help educate breast cancer patients so that, along with their doctors, they can determine the right course of treatment.

The app allows patients to enter their diagnosis information, with the goal of providing patients with a mobile version of their pathology report so that when they visit other doctors they will have accurate information.

IBM staff storyteller Chris Luongo has created a great infographic explaining the different ways that healthcare could become data driven in the future. The IBM Smarter Planet blog calls it Smarter Healthcare.

We've embedded the infographic below in Microsoft's new web page viewer Zoom.it.

Practice Fusion, one of the SaaS electronic medical record (EMR) pioneers, has announced a Dell-based hardware system bundle for doctors spinning up to its free cloud-based EMR system. Ryan Howard, CEO of Practice Fusion, walked us through what it means to bring the cloud to a small clinic - ground zero in the medical industry's transition to electronic medical records.

The proposition for doctors is simple: The U.S. federal government has proposed incentives to move to electronic systems. A doctor can qualify for $44,000 or $66,000 in federal stimulus dollars for completing the migration in the next several years.

It's a sunny afternoon in San Francisco and health care is in the air. I'm sitting at the the Peet's in the SF Ferry Building eating a vegan ginger cookie and waiting for Matthew Holt, founder of The Health Care Blog and the leader of Health 2.0 conference to show up for an interview. He arrives wearing shorts and a Health 2.0 t-shirt, and has his dog with him. He tells me he jogged to our location on the bay from Health 2.0 headquarters seven minutes away. It's a beautiful day - and here in the United States, the health care reform bill just passed.

ReadWriteWeb's founder and leader, Richard MacManus, joins us, and we dive into a conversation on the revolution underway in cloud, mobile, and social health tools. By the end of the day, we were left with one question: Will health care reform build a health Internet, or will entrepreneurs do it because they can?

Today, the California Health and Human Services convened a summit with an expected three hundred people in the interest of a state HIE (Health Information Exchange). This project has been tasked by volunteers and state groups and led by Jonah Frolich, deputy secretary of California Health and Human Services. The teams formed have met a series of hurdles already in preparation for the next big phase of executing the next generation system and raising an initial seed of $38.8m to move the effort forward.

At stake is at least $3 billion by connecting to these services for doctors and hospitals that qualify by using the HIE as built. This means that doctors can bill for more Medi-Cal and Medicare payments that are expected to be available in coming years from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds while using HIE services. Additionally, the services being created will need to support applications that engage consumers as they play a role.

We see the opportunity for California's investment to touch many interesting areas of cloud computing, identity management, and mobile - right as it is getting interesting.