The problem with venturing into healthcare is dealing with highly regulated industry and wrong incentives for most of the players. "Large networks of engaged u

The problem with venturing into healthcare is dealing with highly regulated industry and wrong incentives for most of the players. "Large networks of engaged users" do exist, but the ones who control real money (doctors, hospitals, insurers and pharmas / device makers) are highly suspicious of outsiders. Every one of them has the incentive to not share their data with the competition, even though they will all publicly pay lip service to doing this in the name of "improving patient care". If you look at patients / consumers, you can roughly divide them into the healthy and the sick. The healthy ones generally speaking do not want to invest time and effort into their health, unless it overlaps with lifestyle / food / entertainment - well covered by ventures we do not normally put into "healthcare" category. If you look at the sick ones, they tend to skew to the older demographic with lower online literacy. Even when you pick out the ones active online who care enough about their conditions what you get at best is small niche communities like PatientsLikeMe.com that are at best able to function as support networks and clinical trial recruiting sites. Did I forget to mention that pharmas and device makers are mortally scared of participating in social media because of FDA? They are in business where even acknowledging any adverse event could make them liable for billions. This is a great example of why for most of the healthcare industry social media is all downside and very little upside.