Health 2.0
As of 2014, approximately 3,000 companies were offering products and services matching this definition, with venture capital funding in the sector exceeding $2.3 billion in 2013.
[9] A recent example is the proposal of statistical framework that utilizes online user-generated content (from social media or search engine queries) to estimate the impact of an influenza vaccination campaign in the UK.
[13] While many individual healthcare providers have started making their own personal contributions to "Public Health 2.0" through personal blogs, social profiles, and websites, other larger organizations, such as the American Heart Association (AHA) and United Medical Education (UME), have a larger team of employees centered around online driven health education, research, and training.
These private organizations recognize the need for free and easy to access health materials often building libraries of educational articles.
However, this line was blurring by 2011-2 as more enterprise vendors started to introduce cloud-based systems and native applications for new devices like smartphones and tablets.
Enabled by information, software, and communities that we collect or create, we the patients can be effective partners in our own healthcare, and we the people can participate in reshaping the health system itself.
[18] Definitions of Medicine 2.0 appear to be very similar but typically include more scientific and research aspects—Medicine 2.0: "Medicine 2.0 applications, services and tools are Web-based services for health care consumers, caregivers, patients, health professionals, and biomedical researchers, that use Web 2.0 technologies as well as semantic web and virtual reality tools, to enable and facilitate specifically social networking, participation, apomediation, collaboration, and openness within and between these user groups.
"[5] Traditional models of medicine had patient records (held on paper or a proprietary computer system) that could only be accessed by a physician or other medical professional.
The treating physician might make a diagnosis or send for tests, the results of which could be transmitted directly to the patient's electronic medical record.
They can also choose to submit more data about themselves, such as through a personalized genomics service to identify any risk factors that might improve or worsen their prognosis.
Partly due to weak definitions, the novelty of the endeavor and its nature as an entrepreneurial (rather than academic) movement, little empirical evidence exists to explain how much Web 2.0 is being used in general.
Firstly, Google has limitations as a diagnostic tool for Medical Doctors (MDs), as it may be effective only for conditions with unique symptoms and signs that can easily be used as search term.
[36][37] Finally, concerns exist about the quality of user-generated content leading to misinformation,[38][39] such as perpetuating the discredited claim that the MMR vaccine may cause autism.
