Web 2.0 in Healthcare (Mashups)

With the recent hype surrounding 'Web 2.0', I'm surprised that there's hardly any mention of it in the Healthcare space. Let's consider the recent phenomenon of "mashups". A mashup is a website or Web 2.0 application that uses content from more than one source to create a completely new service. Content used in mashups is typically consumed from loosely coupled data like RSS, REST, XML or APIs.

For example, many mashups that use Google Maps are in use on the Internet. Google makes freely available access to its map engine through an API. Most people consider a Mashup a use of Google maps and another source of data - a good example is http://www.housingmaps.com/ where data from Google maps and data from Craigs List are put together in a "mashup" to create an entirely new site.

Healthcare Mashups
Consider for a moment that a patient has a chronic disease and would like to look at current news about her disease from WebMD but also view her health goals and other healthcare data within the same Web page. This could be achieved using a mashup of WebMD RSS Feeds and a REST service that gets data from an internal application.



Since most sites such as WebMD now offer RSS feeds this is very simple to achieve technically yet can have a huge impact when used in a mashup. When most people think about mashups they think of an extension of Google Maps. But Google is only setting the example of a mashup in Web 2.0.

It's up to our imaginations and creativity to implement mashups in other healthcare applications...