As patients or health consumers, we have an ever-increasing abundance of information at our fingertips.  The Web is full of resources, from WebMd to Wikipedia to Daily Strength to a host of other sites that may or may not be reliable sources.  Even the most savvy of users may find sifting through all this information a challenge.  Companies like Navigenics and 23andMe provide complex data about our personal health that certainly requires explanation to be properly understood.  As we continue to move toward empowering people to become active participants in their health care, we make the assumption that they will be able to keep up with and synthesize the abundance of information that may be relevant to their health.

Next up this morning, representatives from WebMD, Microsoft HealthVault, Aetna, Google Health, and Yahoo! Health are giving presentations and demonstrations of consumer-targetted health information aggregator platforms. Most of these are variations on personal health records (PHR) that can send out health-related alerts to their users; offer online coaches and medication management applications; and generally provide a (hopefully) convenient and secure place for consumers to store and access their personal health information.

These are the questions I often find myself pondering as I stand in the cold medicine aisle at my local drugstore. This morning, Rod Falcon, Director of the Health Horizons Program, dropped a good old-fashioned newspaper on my desk that announced a solution to these dilemmas. Evincii, a Mountain View, CA, startup that has been in (mostly) stealth mode since 2005, has now formally unveiled its in-store, interactive, over-the-counter (OTC) drug information kiosk.

In August, I wrote about the demise of the Regional Health Information Organization (RHIO) in Santa Barbara. In January, the California HealthCare Foundation (CHCF) published a discouraging report about these collaborative health information technology (IT) offerings.