Guest blogger Janice McCallum shared her interview from the StrataRx conference. Janice McCallum is a health data strategist at Health Content Advisors. Her blog and tweets (@janicemccallum) reflect her focus on the value of information to all healthcare stakeholders and the importance of patient access to information.  She has been a member of the Society for Participatory Medicine since 2009.

In 2007 and 2008, I organized an event called Health Content with my partners at the InfoCommerce Group. Our objective was to highlight how the digitization of healthcare information used by all stakeholder groups would affect the healthcare industry. Health Content covered topics such as Bringing Together Content with Tech, Healthcare Quality Metrics, Price Transparency, and Personalized Medicine. Needless to say, we were ahead of our time.

Fast forward to the present and O’Reilly Media’s StrataRx conference, which is described in part as “a unique forum bringing together the diverse communities driving innovations in big data analytics for healthcare” is filling the gap left when we discontinued the Health Content conference. A lot has happened since 2008. For one thing, the term “big data” wasn’t an overused term back then! Also, huge advances have occurred in genomics and personalized medicine, including significant cost decreases for sequencing genes. Furthermore, adoption of electronic health record (EHR) systems has experienced strong growth in large part due to federal incentives. It all adds up to major new sources of data and opportunities for new uses of health data.

But, we’re still struggling with how to define acceptable methods for exchanging data and providing the right kind of incentives to reward people who add value to data.

In the interview below, I talk with Andy Oram of O’Reilly Media about my observations from StrataRx.

If the video above does not work, please use this link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POPlhMXysYQ&feature=youtu.be

A couple of outtakes:

• We’re relying too much on old business models for health data exchange
• We need to remove information asymmetry barriers between providers and patients
• Patients can provide more than just data; they can provide insight into what the data means in the context of their own health.

In short, we’re at the early stages of realizing the value of health data and there remain a lot of privacy, access, and other business model details to work out.

See: StrataRx for more video coverage of the event.