SAN FRANCISCO – Health 2.0 technologies and services are powerful tools that can lower administrative healthcare costs, a panel told attendees at Tuesday's Health 2.0 Conference.

Health 2.0 enables the democratization of information and is the best way to ultimately control cost through privacy transparency and the elimination of administrative waste and redundancy, said medical economist J.D. Klienke.

Defined as participatory or user-generated healthcare that incorporates search and tools and creates communities, Health 2.0 has been evolving to enable users to connect to providers, create partnerships to reform healthcare delivery and use data to drive decision and discovery.

Health 2.0 can be helpful if it manages to persuade patients that less care is better care and healthcare can be dangerous to one's health, said Maggie Mahar, author and Health Care Fellow at The Century Foundation. She noted that 20 percent to 30 percent of all elective surgeries should not be performed because the risks far outweigh the benefits.

Health 2.0 should enable shared decision-making between doctors and patients, but doctors need to be honest and bring to the table the benefits of risks of healthcare, she said.

Health 2.0 won’t make healthcare more affordable, said Al Waxman, CEO of venture fund company Psilos. Still, he said, it presents a “tremendous opportunity” to help change the healthcare system with the movement of data.

Luke Mitchell, senior editor for Harper’s Magazine, wondered if Health 2.0 could reduce the growth of healthcare while allowing profitability. Added Waxman: If healthcare costs were brought in line with the Gross Domestic Product, it would be a positive thing.

A new intervention that engages behavioral modification drives up cost in the short term, Klienke noted. When the intervention works and the patients are moved out of the high-risk pool and their conditions are managed, the system will reap indirect savings in the mid-term, he said.

In the long term, however, “costs go through the roof” because people are living longer, he said.

Still, by providing people with information, money would be spent “less stupidly” in the healthcare system, said Klienke.