After everyone figured out that HIT, eHealth, & mHealth were imprecise terms, sometime around 2010 the term digital health became the currency du jour to refer to the new health information technologies, which we showcase at Health 2.0. But even that term is wrong. After all the ugly client-server EMRs (and we know who they are) that have proliferated over the past decade or so are "digital". But the new technologies that have emerged from Silicon Valley and beyond in the past decade or so are based on SMAC.
These underlying technologies are Social. They use Mobile operating systems (iOS & Android). They involve big data Analytics. And underlying them all is the Cloud. The term SMAC has been used predominantly outside the US, but it's a way to distinguish these now mature "new" information technologies from the enterprise-based client-server technologies that preceded them and are still prevalent especially in health care enterprises.
For health we've decided to add a couple of things. One is another S, for Sensors. The "Internet of things" includes dozens of technologies being used for health-related purposes. But the remaining thing health needs (and society needs) is empathy or Kindness. So that K is the final piece of the SMACK Health puzzle
Matthew Holt coined this term back in very late 2015 to help describe the underlying technologies that are slowly but sure coming into health care.
The genesis for this site came on a suggestion from Jennifer Lannon, who runs the Health 2.0 Miami Chapter and BD at dotHealth. We are excited that SMACK.health is one of the first sites launching on the new .health domain extension, and hope to grow this site as part of a new era of online health.
