Consumer facing finalists Zest Health, Health Recovery Solution, Tiatros, Sense.ly, and the MediSafe Project each had 5 minutes to pitch their business plan followed by 5 minutes of Q&A from our panel of expert judges.

From Orange Labs, Adam built a prototype virtual patient triage and training device using voice recognition, avatars and the Kinect which he showed at Health 2.0 last year. Now the company spun out from Orange Labs, Sense.ly, is a virtual online nurse equipped with a set of remote diagnostic tools.

Although progress is being made in addressing deficiencies in how care is delivered, the U.S. health care system is still a “broken” system from the perspective of many patients and providers. Many patients still find it difficult to access a health provider. Providers find that reimbursement rules constrain the types of interactions for which they’ll be paid. In response to persistent problems with health care delivery a variety of new approaches to care delivery have emerged. We’ll take a look at a group of companies that have developed technologies to facilitate interactions between patients and providers.

Danny Sands moderates this panel on innovative technologies that allow for new avenues of patient-provider communication.

Adam Odessky, Product Manager at Sense.ly, demos this virtual online nurse equipped with a set of remote diagnostic tools. Using speech recognition, augmented reality, and medical devices Sense.ly can quickly assess a patient’s condition and provide caregivers with relevant insights for meaningful follow-up.

We talked with Adam Odessky, Product Manager at Orange Labs, about the biggest challenges, trends, and developments in health care technology at the San Francisco 2011 Health 2.0 conference.

Adam Odessky, Product Manager, Orange
Ready for something a little bit different? Working in the lab at Orange, Adam has put together a virtual patient triage and training device using voice recognition, avatars and the Kinnect. This is a prototype but you’ll see that it might be part of the answer for the physician shortage, and it’s very cool. This demo was part of “The Next Generation of Health 2.0 in the Doctor’s Office” panel at the 2011 Health 2.0 conference in San Francisco.

SaaS and cloud-based medical record products and services are heading aggressively for physician offices. In parallel, the race for meaningful use dollars is on and legacy enterprise vendors are competing with startups offering more modular, lightweight tools across a variety of unplatforms. So who’s going to win in the race to getting EMRs to the 70% of American practices that don’t have them? And what services are needed – is software even enough?