Today, was the third and last day of the WHIT. 3.0 Conference in Washington, D.C.. It was the day that some of the heavy hitters of the technology industry — Tim Berners-Lee, Steve Case, and Adam Bosworth, came to give their take on health care and innovation.

The fast talking Berners-Lee (inventor of the world wide web) gave a short and speedy history of the thinking that led to the early development of the web, and a view into his current work on the semantic web. He tried to show the relevance of the semantic web for health care and broadly encouraged a “just do it” approach to identifying and building the necessary ontologies relevant to the health care system. Berners-Lee then cajoled his audience on everything from adhering to the “golden rule of one web” to giving all things their unique URI, to demanding data in RDF/SPARQL.

Steve Case (Co-Founder America Online (AOL) Chairman & CEO Revolution Health) gave his considered opinion on the state of the U.S. health care system, then proceeding then to make eight predictions:

• Consumers are going to take control of health care big time;
• Centralized approaches to controlling information in health care will breakdown with access becoming more open and distributed;
• There will be less not more government regulation of health care because the pace of innovation will demand it;
• There will be a torrent of innovation relevant to health care with the inevitable, but short term chaos, to follow;
• There will be more emphasis on being healthy and taking more individual responsibility;
• The personalization of health care will proceed with the development of consumer technology tools; and finally,
• The “killer app” for health care is, and will be. . . (drum role) . . . “community”. Facebook, IM, Chat — social media, and the people aspect of health care technology — will be the key driver of any progress.

I was really looking forward to Adam Bosworth (Chief Executive Officer, Keas, Inc.; Former Vice President Google, Inc.) in order to get an idea of where he was heading with his new start-up company, Keas, Inc. But alas, unless we could read between the lines in his speech, he gave no clue even under direct questioning.

What he did deliver to the crowd was an eloquent and impassioned rant on just how broken the health care system is. This was probably old news to this audience, but one always likes to hear a good thrashing of the idiots, incompetents, and evil doers that victimize the hapless patient. While not very nuanced about what to do about the multiple catch-22s inherent in health care, it was a fine speech.

Bosworth did make several important points worth noting. He, like many others in the information technology industry, have a hard time empowering consumers as a result of privacy rules. Consumers need to gain control of their health care information. “Giving patients control over their own data is what we need to do,” says Bosworth emphatically. But the government denies us that ability. Government is “trading off the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people to prevent the exposure of very few” with these laws against ” possible and rare risks to privacy.”

Bosworth also wants a new health consumer bill or rights (No mention of President’s Clinton’s Patient Bill of Rights and Responsibilities circa 1998 — no matter) that will make sure consumers have access to their data electronically from all the players in health care. This is critically important if consumers are going to be able to use the information intelligently.

On another front, Bosworth wants to get physicians participating in online communities talking about health care. Most are fearful and reluctant to do so due to a host of good financial and legal reasons. He wants protections and financial reimbursements to promote this kind of critical exchange with consumers.

This years’ WHIT Conference was thick with energy, excitement and vision. People are starting to see future possibilities in how the health care system could change. You could hear consensus being built, and how innovative technology along with new business models, can strengthen the political will to take action. Grant Harrison (VP, Integrated Consumer Experience, Humana Inc.) in his presentation on learning what health means to people — “not a state but a skill” — said ” that when we say people are not engaged in their health it just means we don’t understand how they are engaged in their health. ” The path to that understanding is being blazed as we speak.