Health 2.0 Conference Updates

The Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco is underway. For those of you who aren't attending — like myself — I've complied a list of resources to help you follow the action from afar. Of course, Even if you are attending, you still might find these resources useful.

The Official Health 2.0 blog has occasional updates on the conference. Most of the live blogging, however, is taking place on The Health Care Blog. Here, for example, are notes on the keynote address by Clay Shirky.

Information: Most valuable aspect of the Internet: “people.” Those who think about health information think of individual transactions–but the value is when people share this information. Yahoo Groups, “the first social software,” illustrates tremendous public demand for collaboration with others. “Wherever people trust each other, the information will flow...”

Parallel: In healthcare, the standing command-and-control structure sees “healthcare” as the sum total of providers, payers, etc.–the established institutions. But the patients are healthcare too–and they outnumber professionals by 100 to 1. Once they collaborate, the central institutions lose power–and have to change.

Edelman's Health Engagement Blog is also writing about the conference. (If you know of other blogs related to the Health 2.0 Conference, please leave a comment.)

I've written previously on Doctors and Medical Students on Twitter. For those interested in following the real time discussions about the conference on Twitter, here's the link: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=health20+OR+health20con+OR+health2con. The RSS feed, if you'd prefer that, is here.

Finally, three Twitter users that I follow are microblogging the Health 2.0 Conference: SJ Davidson, Enoch Choi of MedHelp (the previous author of Tech Medicine), and the prolific Jen Mccabe Gorman — who was kind enough to post a compendium of her health 2.0 demo tips. (Of course, if you're twittering the conference as well, feel free to post a comment.)