Health 2.0, Plus An Update on Dr. Jay Parkinson’s New Job

By Andrew Meyer on January 7, 2008

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Before I get to Dr. Jay Parkinson's new job at Myca, I have to say that the healthcare industry has intrigued me ever since I was turned off by its current state while doing a summer internship at Adventist Health my sophomore year in college.

I experienced plenty of aspects of the healthcare industry while doing my short but eye-opening internship that made me not want to jump into its current incarnation:

-How hospitals earn most of their money via the myriad of third-party reimbursers (Shudder).

-Communication amongst hospital departments (Bad at my hospital).

-Relationship between doctors and the hospital (Most want nothing to do with the people that pay their income).

-Use of new non-medical technology for communication, customer relationship management, consumer-facing website, etc. (I found this to be the most backwards parts of the hospital I interned at. However, I'm proud to say that one of my summer projects was to implement a new online invoice tracking system that allowed departments to view and search their invoices from their computer. :)

When I got done with my internship back in the summer of 2005, I started trying to track people that were trying to disrupt the healthcare industry with new solutions. At the time, I didn't find much outside of Steve Case's Revolution Health personal health portal.

I have to admit that I slowly lost interest.

That is until I ran into a shout out for Dr. Jay Parkinson's (aka darkshapes) new practice on Noah K's Flickr. I have been tracking Dr. Jay Parkinson via his blog ever since.

About two weeks ago, he leaked via the comments under one of his Flickr photos that he was working with a company from Quebec and that the new project would be "a big middle finger to the Industry".

He than let us know on his blog that the company's name is Myca.

Well, I've done some research and it turns out that Myca is a pioneer of Telemedicine 2.0. It looks like they are working on two new products called DoctorPhone and BabyPhone that will offer patients and parents instant videoconferences with physicians via cell phone (thanks Business 2.0 Magazine).

The product features lineup on their website look really interesting. Can't wait to see how doctors other than Dr. Jay Parkinson implement this.

Myca's previous product called MyFoodPhone let subscribers get biweekly videos via e-mail offering personalized dietary suggestions based on their phone snapshots. Interesting.

Healthcare disruptors are going to get a lot of coverage on BUZZYEAH in the next year or so as I said in my New Year's post.

I'm excited about Health 2.0 its focus on Web 2.0 technologies transforming the relationship between healthcare providers and consumers.

I'm new to all of this so if you know a major disruptor or somebody with a great Health 2.0 blog let me know!

Right now, here are a few blogs I'm following: Health 2.0 Blog, Dr. Robert Wachter's blog (had an excellent post recently that touched on Health 2.0) and ChangeNow4Health.

Update: Nice! Jay promises that Myca is "much, much bigger than BabyPhone or DoctorPhone." See his comment below for more.

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