Someday the Internet will help you be well

Secret: not everyone is looking for ways to spend more time on the Internet.

Try explaining to a non-geek why they would use a website to keep track of their wine inventory. Cork’d is one such site that I imagine gains usage from two population extremes: social networking fanatics and wine fanatics. Individuals outside of one or both of these categories come up with questions like “Why would I go to a website to keep track of the wine in my cellar?”

A similar condition exists in every other vertical as well, and rate of adoption outside of the fanatic category depends on the added value (or lack thereof) of each service.

I’ll use preventative healthcare as an example that I think will see a lot of movement in the next year. For a preventative healthcare site to lock on to a larger population and add value, it has to do more than let a user track their weight or calorie intake or import pedometer readings. It’s the same issue that cork’d and other social software sites share. What we see as a more convenient way to do something is often seen as the opposite by the non-fanatic or non-geek crowd, and if the added value doesn’t significantly outweigh its inconvenience, the service fails.

David Hunnicutt, President of the Wellness Councils of America, posted today about selecting a Health Risk Assessment (HRA) / Personal Health Assessment (PHA) for your group. I’ll leave the long-form definition to Dr. Hunnicutt, but the benefit of a PHA is simple – it lets an individual develop a baseline for change by providing a detailed snapshot of their current health status. This is added value. It’s also a foundation that seems to be missing from all personal wellness / preventative health / fitness / self-improvement sites. (It should be a surprise that nearly all enterprise wellness / preventative health / fitness / self-improvement sites get this part right.)

I posted a few months ago about the lacking effect of Web 2.0 on healthcare in general and wellness specifically. The post has since generated a lot of emails with links to recently launched services. In each case the site will focus in on certain aspects of wellness (i.e.: calorie intake) and many of them do their thing very well. I have yet to see one, though, that lets a user first develop a baseline personal health status. Because of this, each of them will run into the same question from the non-geek crowd: “Do I really need a website to let me track ___?”

This is another topic to come back to – there’s no reason enterprise solutions can’t be applied (and improved) to personal health as well. In the meantime, if anyone knows of any services that allow individuals to assess, monitor and improve their overall health status, let me know. I’m looking for ways to spend more time on the Internet.