Day One: Health 3.0

Day One.

The Health Care Globalization Summit opens later today, so let me set the stage a little more.

Today focuses on something called "Health 3.0," which is Web-based health care. The idea is to use the Internet to get patients thinking more like consumers -- shopping around for the doctors and treatment they want, rather than relying on their family doctor to be the source of all such information.

There's an obvious attraction to this -- who hasn't been frustrated by a doctor or clinic before? If you have, giving patients some choice and power can start too look attractive.

But there's obvious downsides, too. Doctors have been to medical school, after all, and no amount of Web surfing by a patient can replace that.

The other part of Health 3.0 is the ability to shop around for medical care abroad, the topic that brought me to Las Vegas. Last week, I met with a woman who went online, found a Boston-based medical tourism broker and got her back fixed in Bangalore. Last summer, she was bed-ridden. This summer, she's taking up sky diving. She was on a waiting list for 16 years to get the surgery, and arranged it through the broker in a matter of weeks -- after handing over her credit card number.

But don't talk to her about the rights and wrongs of jumping the queue for surgery by paying a few thousand dollars. She's completely frustrated by the long waiting lists for surgery in Canada, like a lot of people. And that's why medical tourism in growing in Canada and giving new meaning to two-tier medicine.

It should be an interesting week.