Healthcare Unbound is a conference devoted to "unbinding" healthcare. This is a fancy (yet accurate!) term for describing innovative models of care delivery that do not require a patient to be tied up to a hospital bed.

Produced by The Center for Business Innovation (TCBI), the conference is in its 4th year, attracting a nice roster of health tech companies involved in wireless, remote monitoring and home telehealth. New Internet technologies are somewhere in the mix too, which is how I got to speak there.

So what are the most notable things I found there?

First of all, lots of hoopla about upcoming "Google Health", which was prominently featured in several sessions (here is the program). There has been plenty of speculation about it around blogosphere, but what I would really like to see is the real product, level of traction with consumers, and how many hospitals and insurance companies are going to just hand over their data to Google.

The keynote by Liz Boehm from Forrester looking at usability implications of healthcare technology was just awesome. Follow the link to get the slides and recent reports by Liz and her colleague Chloe Stromberg. Chloe who was on the same panel with me, presented some fresh and fascinating data on how consumers use and combine online/offline health support resources.

Speaking of my panel, it was indicative of the "state of health social media" or just how early we are in the game

My feeling was that the traditional "health technology industry" - cream of the crop of which represented at the conference - is still in the earliest stages of really understanding the impact of the latest Internet tech. Let alone real adoption! Here is the full roster of my co-panelists:

• David C. Kibbe, MD, MBA, Principal, THE KIBBE GROUP & Senior Advisor, Center for Health Information Technology, AMERICAN ACADEMY OF FAMILY PHYSICIANS
• David H. Kil, Chief Scientist, Healthcare Informatics, ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY LABS
• Steven Locke, MD, Research Psychiatrist, BETH ISRAEL DEACONESS MEDICAL CENTER, Associate Professor of Psychiatry, HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL & Associate Professor of Health Sciences and Technology, MIT
• Joshua Seidman, PhD, President, CENTER FOR INFORMATION THERAPY
• Chloe Stromberg, Analyst, Marketing, FORRESTER RESEARCH
  Richard M. Peters, Jr, MD, President & CEO, PTRx, INC.

Most of the questions and comments from the audience seemed to share a theme of adjusting to the environment when consumer is (really) in control. A typical question was "how do you know the information you find is accurate" - which could be rephrased into "who is infallible" (HINT: Nobody). This is the kind of questions I kept getting last year speaking to healthcare marketing audiences - who now seem to be ahead of their IT colleagues in recognizing the changes!

Why would I say such a thing? Because this latest technology wave, call it Health 2.0, Web 2.0 or Social Media is not about technology but about people expressing themselves, breakdown and bypass of institutional barriers and finally disruption and redesign of existing healthcare business models. These were my remarks to the group, but I could sense some shock and unease in the audience!

In any case, expect some interesting activity as healthcare tech community gets a handle on the challenges from the media world.