I have seen the future of Health 2.0, and it is Medzio. It’s flexible, it’s consumer-facing and -friendly, it integrates into the activities of daily living, it makes accessing health information easier and integrateable, and it’s fun.
As an observer of health information tools for over two decades, the company known as A.D.A.M. has always been in my radar. I have respected their work in medical images from the early days of the firm’s inception, and when the Internet arrived in health care, A.D.A.M. smartly figured out where to play in that new media environment.
Of all the offerings I witnessed at this week’s Health 2.0 Conference in Coston, this is something completely different.
It has been disappointing that while there is a dizzying array of consumer-facing applications, the user has had to do a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to accessing the various apps on different platforms and in fragmented ways.
Welcome, Medzio. This new-new offering from A.D.A.M. is a departure from the company’s original business, and it’s a look into what will be best about Health 2.0. Think about the Innovator’s Dilemma, and A.D.A.M. has done a new-new thing, which isn’t easy to pull off.
The beautiful thing, as Martha would say, about Medzio is it’s ability for the health citizen-consumer to pull together whatever apps they like for managing their health, along with content and experts that they choose for themselves from a growing array of offers. And it’s mobile!
It’s the connectivity and the convergence that yields the value. And for consumers, it’s simple, easy to do, and integrative into peoples’ daily lives.
Health Populi’s Hot Points: We know there have been hundreds of thousands of downloads of health apps from the iTunes store to-date. Yet it’s very early days with more clever health experts and passionate app developers creating targeted, helpful apps for people. Expect more of these great apps to expand on iTunes and through other channels.
Beyond the individual apps, there is tremendous value in the synergies between the apps. Their ability to populate individuals’ personal health records (and the larger electronic health record) will help move health care toward data liquidity.
Think about a consumer’s ability to “GPS” her health care: to bring together expert content and expert voices, local and further afield, at the touch of a download, and on a mobile device. I have seen the future, and it is Medzio.