Metcalfe's Law and Healthcare

To follow-up on my healthcare based comment from class, here a website for a company named Wellsphere that boasts around 4 million monthly unique visitors, according to TechCrunch. This company is an example of an innovator harnessing Metcalfe's law to change the heathcare industry through personalization and community interaction over a growing network.

From the company FAQ:

What is Wellsphere?

Wellsphere is the online destination for all your health information and support needs. You’ll find articles from the world’s best medical experts, patients bravely sharing their stories of survival, and inspiring healthy living professionals helping guide you toward a happy, healthy life. As a member, you can get your questions answered, have access to free tools to help you achieve your health goals, enjoy the support of our caring community, exchange tips and advice, find local resources, and have a chance to tell your own success story.

Most interestingly, Wellsphere also reports that:

"Wellsphere builds proprietary health community platforms to help large organizations improve their employees’ health, and reduce healthcare costs. Stanford University’s BeWell@Stanford platform – powered by Wellsphere at http://stanford.wellsphere.com – has demonstrated the power of community to engage tens of thousands of people in taking steps to improve their health and well-being. Within the Stanford community, Wellsphere’s BeWell platform has achieved incredible results, driving an unprecedented level of engagement in healthy activities and behaviors across Stanford’s faculty, staff and students. Wellsphere’s public community is beginning to replicate this success on a global scale."

As discussed in class, connectivity between patients could turn the healthcare model on its head to a more client or, as Mr. Barret of Intel says, "a customer-driven service." For example, networks give patients greater clout and will likely give rise to unmet needs because patients can now join together to create demands, share their unique knowledge and experiences, and give each other support. This networking and communication among patients was previously unavailable at such a large scale and speed.

Harnessing these networking/community based changes in healthcare requires a tomorrow based approach that healthcare providers would be wise to balance with their today planning to facilitate innovation before other competitors win in this emerging space. The key question is how business will use IT to enable these innovative changes in a similar way that technology facilitates Wellsphere's virtual network.