Marty Tenenbaum's vision for an accelerator for Health2.0

At the end of Health2.0 Conference Marty Tenenbaum asked if there was interest in forming a group to accelerate Health2.0. Earlier this was written up on THCB as though it was another standards group. But that’s not entirely what Marty meant. He explains here:

I’m eager to follow up on the creation of an industry initiative to accelerate the Health 2.0 vision. This organization would do for ehealth what CommerceNet did for ecommerce by catalyzing the market. The Blog posting focused on standards. While standards are important, so is evangelism, business development, lobbying, and especially visionary integration projects that demonstrate the potential of Health 2.0 for improving people's lives.

Early CommerceNet members included startups like Netscape, Yahoo, and Amazon as well as established organizations like Visa/Mastercard, FedEx and IBM. The members of CommerceNet collaborated on initiatives like search, catalogs, security, payment, and shipping/fulfillment, leading to complete end-end transactions where one could actually locate a product, buy it, pay for it and get it delivered. Not only was overall market growth accelerated; many business deals resulted, generating a lot of wealth.

The parallels with Health 2.0 are obvious. Like the days of ecommerce, many energetic entrepreneurs are exploring the seemingly limitless opportunities and obstacles of a huge and important market. Each provides useful but highly fragmented data or services (e.g.,PHRs, search, patient and doctor communities). Aggregating data across communities and integrating services into complete solutions (e.g., selecting the best treatment or physician for you) is much more valuable to consumers and essential if we’re actually going to impact healthcare in meaningful ways.

Everyone interested should move on this as soon as possible to capitalize on the momentum of the amazing conference.

To get involved, you can email healthcare@commerce.net and of course comment here.