Web 2.0 panacea or placebo for superior healthcare delivery?

Tim Berners-Lee once said that 'Web 2.0' was 'what the Web was supposed to be all along' (Berners-Lee 1989,2006). In 2008, Eseynbach and colleagues coined the term 'Medicine 2.0' to describe the broad adoption of Web 2.0 technologies into the healthcare context as well as the emergence of personal healthcare application platforms and personally controlled health record platforms (Eseynbach 2008). Should we then extrapolate and infer then, that this is what e-health should have been all along or will this latest development be another headache for healthcare systems globally, which are already haemorrhaging money with no sign of any solution to effect sustainable value-driven healthcare solutions. The following examines the possibilities for Web 2.0 to enable superior healthcare delivery in an attempt to shed some light on this question.