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I was fascinated by this article about the challenges of healthcare content startups. No so much about why such companies exist, but in hearing about how the general market views “patients” and “consumers” and what implications that has for healthcare institutions.

After an afternoon discussing the challenges of establishing a health content startup, the final panel at EconHealth got to deals: who’s buying and who’s investing in what. ContentNext publisher Rafat Ali moderated a discussion among a group of dealmakers, from the perspective of investors, bankers and would-be buyers.

– Interest areas: Esther Dyson: “The way I divide the market is into the arms merchants and the establishment… what’s been missing: there’s been professional content and there’s user generated content, which may or may not be valuable or reliable… and then the third thing is the content about the users.” It’s the third thing that’s exciting to Dyson, who is an investor in 23andMe, the know-your-own-genes startup. “I think it’s this area that’s so exciting… Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) is really, really well positioned, as is Google.” With all these things, there’s a question on whether users are aware of these new tools. Morris R. Levitt, Managing Director-Life Sciences, Desilva+Phillips, noted that the big buyers of these startups are either PE-backed platforms or major consumer media firms, like MSO. The problem: “When I listen to a lot of these specialty things, I find that a very low percentage of things are of interest to these organizations.” Most of them aren’t up to scale. Women are particularly valuable, since in many households, said Levitt: “women are the chief medical officers.”

I know many hospital CMOs who might bristle at the last conclusion, but it underscores a complete lack of thinking about providers in this conversation. Are we the only company in the US who is looking at the issue this way?

Follow the link for more above.

Here is an excellent blog post about HealthVault vs. Google Health.

It’s worth a read-through, but the thing that’s clear to us is that neither Microsoft or Google is thinking too much yet about how the hospital institution will interact with the data they collect. Since they’re more in the PHR model — well, Google’s is squarely; HealthVault is just a storage space, but that’s surprisingly useful for reasons you’ll read about in coming weeks — you still have the problem of another stream of care-related data.

Most hospitals are still struggling to connect the dots and collect everything that happens inside their walls, never mind deal with information a patient may have. So while both of these applications might help the physician/patient face-to-face interaction become a more informed experience, they don’t do much to address the operational failure in healthcare of how data is distributed in a system.

In other words, nurses will still be answering phones from referring docs, scratching down notes, and flagging paper files with sticky notes for some time.

(And hey, that’s more an observation than a complaint.)

Google is one step closer to organizing the world’s information. It has announced in the Wall Street Journal this week that it will begin to allow people to put their health records on the web. Actually within Google, which really isn’t the web. On the web would probably be a little too broad since that usually means it can be searched for and viewed by everyone. Google is developing a new health record initiative that will allow people to upload and manage their health information on the Google platform. I refer to it as a platform and not a web site, because Google technically is not a web site. More on that below. Google much like Microsoft, and its HealthVault program, are entrenching themselves more and more into our lives. They are no longer just search engines indexing sites; they are becoming huge depositories of information that will eventually know more about you and friends and family than you do. This is not a bad thing, and you shouldn’t complain about it because you agreed to it when you signed up for your Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo! account. You gave up your “privacy” when you clicked on the terms of service agreement checkbox. I find it interesting when people complain about privacy on the Internet. The Internet is a public space that is completely voluntary; nobody makes you put your information out there. Actually, nobody makes you go online and search for stuff or read email, so the arguments about privacy are weak. It is a risk you take when you venture into a public forum.

A Google Spokesman in the WSJ stated that:

“For us trust between Google and our users is one of the absolute cornerstones of our business. And we are absolutely committed to continuing that dedication in all of our efforts.”

Can your credit card company say that?

A fact that some have realized but most have not is that the Internet is not just about web sites. People use the Internet for almost everything, a lot of it no longer focused on someone going to a web site and reading about an organization and its products. It is about interacting with others, forming communities and organizing our crazy lives. The most popular sites are not ExxonMobil, GE, Coke and other very large organizations. They are sites such as Reddit, Zulu, Furl, Digg, FaceBook, YouTube, Ebay, LinkedIn, Google and other sites that are interactive and form community. Google has been more than a search engine for quite some time it offers Gmail, office applications, video, blogging services, instant messaging, photos… The idea of providing health records is just a logical step in its progression of filling its corporate mission of gathering the information of the world. You are in the world, and your health record is information…

Hospitals and other health organizations need to take off their 1999 hat, and realize that people really don’t care about your facility or no smoking policy. People want to take control of their health and the way they are treated when they interact with a hospital. This will be done through hospital sites becoming more interactive and community focused through video, blogs, forums, and hospitals working with organizations such as Google, Revolution Health and Microsoft in creating portable electronic health records. Hospitals talk about being patient centric, here is one more way to do that.

Cleveland Clinic seems to have figured it out, we wrote about it earlier this week…

• Google and Cleveland Clinic Join Forces to Organize Your Health
• More on Google’s Partnership with Cleveland Clinic

I was in the midst of the great towers of GE, Cerner, Microsoft, and the other glittering HIMSS palaces and there was one player out of place: Google.

It had such a modest footprint and has been so quiet about the partnership with Cleveland Clinic, you’d never know they launched a major initiative. There were no banners advertising Google was even at the show, nevermind they were entering the PHR space.

But I can tell you one thing: from my unofficial poll, PHR vendors seemed a lot more concerned about Google than they did about Microsoft’s Health Vault. (”Health Vault is just a place to store stuff,” is what was more or less repeated back to me — which is more or less the official party line.)

In show full of massive overstatement — I know of several companies in the financial dumps who made significant booth investments — Google’s presence was, for a soon-to-be major player, oddly understated.