ReadWriteWeb

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.

Apple's "iTablet" - whatever it may be - could be destined to transform our care delivery system in a major way. For years, key hardware vendors like Panasonic, Toshiba, HP and Intel have been working hard to embed tablet computers into hospitals.

The promise of improved clinical information systems, based on real-time information updates across patient touchpoints could be a workflow game changer. If the tablet becomes the tool that is carried with a nurse or doctor on their travels from patient to patient, it will save time, money and lives by enabling the first "always updated" system.

Feeling a bit under the weather? Soon you'll be able to cough into your mobile phone for an instant diagnosis. A research firm called STAR Analytical Services is working to develop software that can analyze the sound of a cough and identify it as either associated with a common cold, the flu, or something worse - like pneumonia or another serious respiratory disease. Just as doctors have been doing for years, the software will "listen" to the wetness or dryness of a cough and determine whether all you need is a lozenge or if you need to come in for a doctor's visit instead.

Anyone who has ever tried to keep the peace is told to avoid two topics: religion and politics. The latter is precisely the reason a flame war has ensued on Facebook. In an effort to personalize healthcare reform benefits, WhiteHouse.gov launched a "Reality Check" Facebook quiz application to rally for President Barack Obama's widely disputed Health Insurance Reform Plan. While the application was only shared with Facebook users 6 hours ago, 350 people have already commented on everything from education, to war, to congressional travel records to general partisanship.

A prototype for an iPhone app that provides an integrated hardware-software solution for diabetes patients, has won a $10,000 prize in a competition run by DiabetesMine. The competition aimed to find an iPod-like device or web app for diabetes management. The winning concept was designed to solve a problem that all diabetes patients (including this author) are familiar with: carrying around a number of disparate diabetes devices. It's often awkward and inconvenient, for example when you go out for dinner. So the application developers asked: why can't they all be housed in your mobile phone?

Healthline, a leading provider of intelligent health information services, today announced two additions to its stable of medical search tools: TreatmentSearch, the first treatment search application for the web, and DocSearch, a recommendation tool for recommending specialists based semantic parsing of symptom or health condition information. Other Healthline tools include SymptomSearch and DrugSearch. The integrated suite of Healthline Clinical Applications is now available on Healthline.com.

One of the most pleasing Web trends we're seeing in 2009 is the increasing penetration of web apps into the real world. Web applications for healthcare is one example. We wrote about a new Web-based Radiology Theatre built by IBM yesterday and today we discuss an iPhone app that helps people with diabetes. At yesterday's iPhone OS 3.0 announcement, diabetes software company LifeScan (owned by Johnson & Johnson) unveiled an iPhone app that wirelessly connects to a Bluetooth-enabled glucose meter.

At ETech today members of the InSTEDD team spoke about how they have been building SMS and mapping applications, in the Mekong Delta in the jungles of South East Asia. InSTEDD (Innovative Support to Emergencies Diseases and Disasters) was organized in 2006-2007 and aims to harness technology to help with early warning, prevention and response to disasters and public health threats. Some of the issues InSTEDD came across in the Mekong Delta were figuring out multilingual issues, human interaction design for 140 characters, ad-hoc team creation, and data integration of disconnected systems. After the jump is a summary of their presentation at ETech.

"There are 2.2 billion mobile phones in the developing world, 305 million computers but only 11 million hospital beds," said Terry Kramer, strategy director at British operator Vodafone at the Mobile World Congress held in Barcelona this week. That's why Vodafone, along with the United Nations and the Rockerfeller Foundation's mHealth Alliance have banded together to advance the use of mobile phones to better aid those in need of healthcare in the developing world.