Can Health Care 2.0 Be as Easy as Craigslist? Craig Thinks So

Craigslist founder Craig Newmark is optimistic about the health care industry’s 21st-century makeover: mobile electronic health records, remote patient monitoring, and a new corporate culture, friendly to the open-source systems and workplace democracy in which tech innovation thrives.

Years after his low-production classified advertisements websites rocked the media world with its surprising popularity, Newmark has been a highly sought consultant for government agencies eager for their own websites to mimic Craigslist's user-friendliness. "Voices like his make a real difference in creating the culture of transparency, accountability and trust that are essential to implementing the secretary's groundbreaking transformation," the Veteran's Administration's Chief Technology Officer, Peter Levin, toldFederal Computer Week.

Inundated with a fresh generation of returning soldiers, the Pentagon and the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs saw a need to undergo significant change. "There’s a lot of vets coming home," Newmark tells Fast Company, "so the VA needs to transform itself, and they’re actually doing it."

For starters, the VA, in recognition of the snail-like pace of governmental projects, opened up their new electronic health system to a public-private competition. The VA released medical records in a deliberately incomprehensible raw format, so that developers would be encouraged to design user-friendly systems.