Health 2.0 Company Launch Review Part 6

This post continues the series on the Health 2.0 SF and is the second consecutive editorial featuring small companies launched and featured at the conference.

Company name: Tweetwhatyoueat
Pitch: Broadcast meal contents to your twitter followers and the crowd-sourced food database counts your calories and keep track of your diet.
How it works: The Tweetwhatyoueat site recognizes food words in tweets (no hashtags necessary) and automatically records meal times and the calorie content of that food. Users can also input their own calorie values for each meal.
Pros: Public accountability might help diet adherence.
Cons: For those of us with varying (or constant) meal times, tweeting every bite is a burden.

Company name: Bill-Doctor.com
Pitch: Intervenes on behalf of patients to help negotiate hospital bills.
How it works: Patients want to pay less and hospitals want to settle outstanding debts. By providing analysis on hospital costs and past payments the Bill-doctor website helps patients determine a reasonable offer then facilitates communication with the hospital billing office.
Pros: Patients paying less and hospitals getting paid is a win-win.
Cons: Doesn't resolve much if the patient can't pay at all.

Check out the previous related post about small companies at Health 2.0 SF here, and others in the series on the launch of a large company here and here. Posts in the series covering the announcement of the government's announcement of free HHS data are here and here.

For more on Health 2.0 SF, check out Jane Sarasohn-Kahn's summary post from Oct 11 on her Health Populi blog. Also check out the conference website at health2con(dot)com for videos of the proceedings.