By Robert Groth

October 6th and 7th was the 2009 Health 2.0 “User-generated” Healthcare conference in San Francisco, CA spent a great deal of time discussing the emergence of clinical groupware and the next generation of online clinician-patient interaction tools. There was lively debate on whether these technologies were ready to be adopted, whether our healthcare system would make a way to pay for the solutions, and whether doctors would use clinical groupware. A three doctor panel following demos of the five clinical groupware web applications were skeptical of wide spread use.

On day one of the conference five senior executives from emerging clinical groupware companies spoke about and demonstrated their own technologies. The speakers included Paul Abramson of Health, Roy Schoenberg, the CEO of American Well, Martin Pellinate, the CEO of VisionTree Software, Steve Adams, CEO of RMD Networks, and Arien Malec, the VP of Product Management for Relay Health.

A paper just published online in a March, 2009 edition of Science, Elliott Margulies, Ph.D., of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), Thomas Tullius, Ph.D., of Boston University, and other researchers working with the National Institute of Health announced a new approach for detecting functional genomic regions. The innovative new strategy for understanding the human genome uses three-dimensional shapes of a genome’s DNA rather than just using a sequence of the four-letter alphabet of its DNA bases.

“This new approach is an exciting advance that will speed our efforts to identify functional elements in the genome, which is one of the major challenges facing genomic researchers today,” said NHGRI Scientific Director Eric Green, M.D., Ph.D. “Coupled with continued innovations in DNA sequencing, this topography-informed approach will expand our ongoing efforts to use genomic information to improve human health.”

Continue reading →