Gov 2.0 and Health…what are your thoughts?

So I’m speaking on Thursday at O’Reilly’s Gov 2.0 Expo in DC. Here’s the description of Gov 2.0:

The rise of Government 2.0 signals the emergence of IT innovation and the Web as a platform for fostering efficiencies within government and citizen participation. How can we harness these innovations to decrease waste and increase productivity? 

I’ll be speaking about what the government can do with technology to foster change in health and medical care. Here are a few of the things I’ll be speaking about.

  • I think the government should establish the standards around a national physician online profile maintained by the physician with an API to access the information (name, addresses, credentials, philosophy, services provided, etc.). Every physician already has a National Provider Identifier. Now that this number is in place, let’s connect information and services to the physician’s profile.
  • Once a profile is established, various services can be connected to it. For example, a physician could connect her calendar to the profile. The government should define the standards for medical services calendaring. An API could be published to access this information. Once this happens, we could do a search for available doctors anywhere in the US with an interface as slick as kayak.com searches for an empty seat on a plane. We could also see the volume of one ER over another in real time and base our decisions on where to go.
  • What if a standardized dataset around inventory was also connected to a physician’s profile? We could do a search for the closest available physician who also has the H1N1 vaccine in stock.

I’m much more interested in actionable tools to match up a person’s needs with the healthcare industry’s supply than giving people access to their medical records. If you ask me, people have problems and need solutions much more than they need access to a random doctor’s note from a visit they had 5 years ago. I think the next big challenge the web should tackle and enable is matching up our individual needs with available human services supply.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on anything else you think the government should do.