By Pat Salber, MD (aka The Doctor Weighs In) and Brian Klepper, PhD (aka The Fake Doctor)

We are in a conference room in San Francisco with about 500 people at the first ever Health 2.0 conference co-sponsored by the Great Health Care Blogger, Matthew Holt (The Health Care Blog) and Indu Subaiya, MD of Etude Scientific.

We are hearing about (and salivating) over the possibilities of user-generated healthcare – web-based consumer driven health care and health support programs. This stuff is real patient-centric health care (as opposed to other things like “consumer-driven health care” that we sometimes call patient-centric, but that are really just less a bit less physician or health plan-centric).

The title of this post comes from one of the opening panelists, Wayne Gattinella, President and CEO, WebMD.  We think it accurately sums up the mess that we
Healthcare is a hairball!experience in health care today. All of you cat owners who have tasted healthcare will be able to relate to this graphic description of the state of the US healthcare system today. What the companies at Health 2.0 want to do is, pardon the cliché, “empower the consumer” with easily accessible health information that they want and online communities that allow them to share personal knowledge and experience.

The companies and websites represented here range from sophisticated vertical health search engines, like Healthia and Healthline to “care communities,” like CaringBridge and Sophia's Garden's Healing in Community. Organized Wisdom is a site that is generating user-generated health information, a Wikipedia type of site. Developers on the demo panels showed off financial websites to help members keep track of health care costs. QuickenHealth and Health Equity were among sites in this space.  And, they demonstrated sites to build physician communities and facilitate physician to physician knowledge sharing, such as PeerClip and Sermo.

There really are way too many innovative products/sites at Health 2.0 to write about them all in detail, but here is a brief list to give you a flavor of what is bubbling up from the tech and medical community:

Daily Strength - A social network of 600 communities serving 100,000 registered users, offering connection with other individuals who also face the same experiences you're dealing with.
Inspire. Brought into the meeting at the last minute as a result of winning the People's Choice Award, Inspire is another very well designed site for patients to collaborate.
Patients Like Me.  Simple tools for patients to track relevant treatments, status and outcomes, as well as their experiences, all in communities.
MedHelp began in 1994, and has developed a robust catalog of patient and expert generated content on specific conditions, including question-answer exchanges between patients and doctors.