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Gartner reports - “the Net killed media;…..healthcare next”.

There’s some debate currently around the exact nature of health care reform that we may expect with the “googlization of everything”. According to Manhattan Research this week, a new study of “cybercitizens” shows that more U.S. adults used the Internet than doctors to obtain health and medical information over the past year; a noticeable change in consumer behavior from previous years, as doctors have traditionally been the top source of health information. Meredith Abreu Ressi, Vice President of Research at Manhattan Research explains, “though doctors remain an essential part of an individual’s health management, consumers are increasingly comfortable using the Internet as a research tool for condition and treatment information. As health care coverage and even routine visits to the doctor becomes less affordable to many Americans, the Internet has emerged as a first line of defense for consumers seeking to manage their health care independently.”

This is old news over at Health Populi, where Jane Sarasohn-Kahn reports on a study by Universal McCann entitled When Did We Start Trusting Strangers: How the Internet Turned Us All into Influencers. The study ranged over 29 countries and involved 17,000 “active internet users” aged between 18 and 54 years old. According to the Health Populi, 24% of active internet users research personal health care issues online and 42% of them recommend personal health care topics online.

That’s not all. Larry Dignan of ZDNet draws on the latest Gartner report which claims that with consumers living online and looking for integrated experiences, personal health records, choices for treatments and alternatives for prevention and monitoring along with social networking all spell doom for health care as we know it. The Internet–and the access it provides to top experts everywhere–can make health care more efficient leaving us with a similar situation to the now-decimated media industry according to Gartner.

Will the Net kill health care as we know it? Should you be concerned that consumers are researching you before they even come and see you? It might depend on what happens with HR 6898, the Health e-Information Technology Act (HEITA) of 2008. The central issue of the bill seems to be who owns health information, that groundspring of professional control in clinical circles, and the attending consequences of the consumer health movement fueled by Netpower. Already there are enterprises like HelloHealth organizing a different form of clinical practice as physicians use web 2.0 technologies to communicate with their patients. Then there is the phenomenon of trusting strangers, also known as swift trust, which has been around since the birth of life online, but made mainstream in health communities like Patientslikeme and Organized Wisdom. My hope is that we will see more communities or sites like Patient Power which has interviews with providers and patients available to consumers so that there is at least a real connection between the two primary partners of health care. This is the foundation of good health and if there is a proliferation of these interactions, then perhaps, just perhaps, Gartner may be right. The Net and its accompanying web 2.0 technologies may just return us to a clinical-relationship centered health care industry. That indeed, would be a body blow for the health care industry as it is currently constructed.