Future Health 100

I was humbled when a leading healthcare website, healthspottr, included me in the list of top innovators in healthcare today. The future health 100 list included people who are working together to make changes for our future, and the professions were varied: science, medicine, technology, business, academia, law, policy, risk capital, new media and patient advocacy.

Healthspottr wrote that one of the reasons I made the list was because DrGreene.com was one of the first sites to deliver advice to patients via the internet. While I’m flattered with the attention, I’m even more pleased to see the other names on this list. Here are just a few of the healthcare thought leaders with whom I’m proud to share the recognition. Many of them support the idea behind the Declaration of Health Data Rights, which proposes that patients should be engaged, knowledgeable participants in their own healthcare decisions.

1. George Halvorson, CEO of Kaiser    As the head of the largest nonprofit health plan and hospital system in the U.S., George has a tremendous influence on the U.S. healthcare system. He is helping to bring healthcare into the digital age, as he was the earliest private sector CEO to commit to an electronic medical records platform.
2. Peter Neupert, VP of Health for Microsoft    Microsoft has made a tremendous impact in the area of healthcare software, and Peter has been their champion. He’s investing in innovative companies that are making great strides in the digital management and organization of healthcare.
3. Uwe Reinhardt, Professor at Princeton University    Dr. Reinhardt is a leading voice in healthcare economics, and he has taken up the cause of helping patients become enlightened healthcare consumers by increasing transparency of healthcare pricing.
4. Jamie Heywood, Chairman of PatientsLikeMe    PatientsLikeMe is a marriage of social networking and healthcare education. The site allows patients and families to share information, support and resources about their ailments. Doctors have found that they can use the collective knowledge of these networks to find new ways to deal with their patients as well.
5. Adam Bosworth, CEO of KEAS Adam founded KEAS, a web-based service that helps consumers address their health concerns with “actionable” information. DrGreene.com is even collaborating on a few of their modules, and we’re proud to be a part of another tool that puts empowering information into the hands of patients.
6. Dave deBronkart, aka e-Patient Dave My friend e-Patient Dave fights for patient rights: dignity, autonomy and the right to make decisions about their care. He uses social media to help spread the word that an enlightened patient is an engaged patient, and an engaged patient can help the healthcare system as a whole.
7. Daniel Sands, Director of Healthcare, Cisco Systems Internet Business Solutions Group    Dr. Sands was one of e-Patient Dave’s primary care physicians when Dave fought his late-stage cancer. In 1998, he wrote the first peer-reviewed article on using email in clinical practice and has been an enthusiastic advocate and thought leader to empower patients to make informed medical decisions about their health.
8. David Kibbe, Founder, Center for Health IT for the American Academy of Family Physicians Dr. Kibbe raised the bar for patient electronic health records with Continuity of Care Record. CCR has a “patient-centric summary” of a person’s medical data, and the software solves one of the big technology challenges that creates compatibility barriers between electronic patient records from different custom software packages.