Disruptive Women in Health Care is pleased to present our first ever Man of the Month post.

We received many worthy suggestions (keep them coming, please) and have quite a line up to share over the next few months.  Today, Google’s Missy Krasner, a founding Disruptive Women in Health Care blogger, interviews Matthew Holt, Co-Founder (along with Indu Subaiya) of Health 2.0.  Matt also serves as editor of The Health Care Blog.  If you have an interest in, or want to learn more about Health Information Technology, how the Internet can improve health outcomes, the wisdom of crowds, and Matt’s pick for HHS Secretary, you are in for a treat.

Let us know what you think.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

With the election around the corner, everyone is hammering about the economy, healthcare reform and the war. Given the critical time in our election history, I found it amusing that I attended the Stanford Healthcare Policy Conference, “Can Innovation Save Healthcare Reform” last week and found the speakers debating the same problems they were talking about 10 years ago. Don’t get me wrong. I bow to the legends at Stanford, like Alan Garber and Alain Enthoven. Those were the giant minds in graduate school that got me interested in healthcare in the first place. But seriously, someone could have peeled me off the floor, I was so bored.

It was like nothing had changed since I left my dorm room in Escondido Village in 1998. It was the same academics muttering about “access, affordability, and quality.” And it dribbled on…“rising healthcare expenditures, cost containment, rationing resources,” …blah, blah, blah. This is why I loved it when Mark Smith, M.D., CEO and President of the California Healthcare Foundation, took the stage and opened his talk with the slightly irreverent comment. He said, “Here we all are talking about healthcare reform, and not one of you has mentioned the patient yet.” I wanted to stand up and applaud (and in full disclosure Mark serves on the Google Health Advisory Council).

I do not pretend to have the magic bullet for healthcare reform in the U.S but here is what I do know about the average “Joe” on the street and what I have learned working on the Google Health team for the past 2 years.

When it comes to healthcare, we are all in denial!

• No one cares about their health until they or a family member gets sick.
• The average consumer (over 52% surveyed) does not understand their health insurance benefits. (Deloitte Center for Health Solutions, 2008 Survey of Healthcare Consumers).

(more…)