WellNet Healthcare, a Bethesda health management company, is launching a beta version of a social network called Point to Point Healthcare this month. WellNet is a company that has made its money collecting data on employees’ medical and pharmacy activity. The new system lets employees create a personal network uniting their insurance claims manager with multiple doctors and pharmacies to better coordinate treatments. As stated in the article, an online concierge helps workers find new specialists, and a message system reminds them to pick up prescriptions. Patients can schedule checkups online, create a wellness journal or even rate their family doc. Sounds great doesn’t it? Oh, wait a minute, they still have to convince 300,000 primary-care doctors to buy into this. Do you think they will pay us? Please. It’s not like we have anything else to do with our time or will have to deal with any other proposed patient-networking sites trying to get our attention (Revolution Health, Microsoft, etc). So why are they doing this? My hunch is that they will clean up on all the data they will be “anonymously” spying on as all this social networking, as they call it, goes on. The future of medicine is even scarier than I thought.
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