Fascinating piece in BusinessWeek this week discussing how Health 2.0 sites (particularly PatientsLikeMe.com) are trying to change the healthcare game.The magazine titles the article “Can patients cure health care?” but they’ve opted for the less aggressive “Health 2.0: Patients as Partners” title online.

I’ve played with PatientsLikeMe in the past and talked about it in presentations and Webinars.Given our paranoia about the privacy of medical information within the industry I am forever surprised just how open health consumers are sometimes willing to be with that same information.

The article includes some background on the site and includes some interesting experiments going on there that the casual visitor would never find.For example, a group of 250 ALS (also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease) patients ran an informal clinical trial.It truly turns our current system on its head!