The Medicine 2.0 Congress

Image via Wikipedia The first "Medicine 2.0" Congress happened on September 4 - 5 in Toronto, Canada. You're justified in being confused by — or even skeptical of — any concept released under the version number "2.0" (or, even God help us, "3.0"). But the people who gathered under the flag of Medicine 2.0 early this month are actually doing interesting work. What does Medicine 2.0 mean? Via the conference website:

Medicine 2.0 applications, services and tools are Web-based services for health care consumers, caregivers, patients, health professionals, and biomedical researchers, that use Web 2.0 technologies as well as semantic web and virtual reality tools, to enable and facilitate specifically social networking, participation, apomediation, collaboration, and openness within and between these user groups.

(If you're qualified to expand on the differences between "Medicine 2.0" and "Health 2.0," please feel free to comment.)

To give you a flavor of the work the Medicine 2.0 folks are doing, here's a selection of abstract titles from the freely-available proceedings:

• Social uses of personal health information within PatientsLikeMe™, an online patient community: What can happen when patients have access to one another’s data
• Inside the Health Blogosphere: Governance, Quality and the New Opinion Leaders
• The Construction of Expertise in the Age of the Internet: Psychotropic Drug Knowledge in Consumer-Constructed Online Spaces
• BioTIFF: Articulating Self-Documenting Personal Health Digital Information Artefacts
• Biosurveillance 2.0: A Social Networking Approach
• From Social Networks to Social Medicine: Exploring the role of online interventions
• Patient Problem-Solving on the Web: How do Patients Use Web Forums to Cope with Chronic Disease?
• Versatile, Immersive, Creative and Dynamic Virtual 3-D Healthcare Learning
  

Many of the Medicine 2.0 presentations have also been posted to Slideshare. Here's
Bertalan Meskó's talk on "Medicine 2.0 with the Eyes of a Medical Student Blogger:"

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Labels: Health care, medicine, Social network, Web 2.0

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