Health 2.0: Breaking Down Barriers to Healthcare Innovation

Pace: The tech world is used to moving quickly, getting new ideas to market and into consumers' hands (or iPhones) before they're outdated. And as we all know, healthcare is not a nimble industry. Both providers and developers at the conference say the industry must figure out some way to meet in the middle.

Too many choices: There are barriers to even the simplest Health 2.0 products. Conduct a search in the Apple store for "health" or "healthcare" and you'll get an overwhelming number of results. And many of them have few or no reviews. Healthcare apps aren't Farmville—docs don't want to make blind choices on apps that might not be useful.

The folks attending Health 2.0 are fervent in their belief that innovation in healthcare will come from outside of the industry. In fact, there's an argument to be made that innovation must come from outside of the healthcare industry—that fresh eyes and new ideas are the only way to affect change and that the healthcare industry, for the most part, isn't capable of doing it on its own.

Those outsiders are courting healthcare. The question is whether or not they'll ever get past the first date.