A Shift in the Power Dynamic: Health 2.0

Posted October 22, 2008 by Lygeia Ricciardi 

I’m writing from the Health 2.0 conference in San Francisco. What is Health 2.0? It’s a grassroots push through which patients are using social networks and other tools to generate their own health data and transform their role vis a vis the healthcare system. Quite honestly, everyone is still trying to figure out exactly what Health 2.0 is. One analogy is to Web 2.0 a more interactive, collaborative, multimedia approach to the Internet than its first iteration. One thing is clear: with Health 2.0 a shift in the traditional power dynamic in healthcare is moving in favor of patients.

This conference is notable in part because of its popularity. There are 1000 people here. The first Health 2.0 conference was held last fall with about half as many participants. It’s also on the West Coast. Being Washington DC-based, most of the health IT conferences I attend in my part of the country have a different vibe. With the exception, of course, of Project HealthDesign’s Expo last September (which was in Washington DC), most of them seem to be about tweaking technology and policy toward including patients more, not truly putting patients at the “center” of the health system. Maybe it’s the California Myth (and particularly, the proximity to Silicon Valley), but I feel like there’s more openness to change here. A sense that change really is happening, regardless of what we do—but that we can help to accelerate it. More later… 

Comments

[Ted Eytan]

Lygeia - commenting on the "feeling" - while it is true that California is ranked #6 in the nation on the Big Five Inventory personality scale, DC is ranked #1, and additionally ranked #3 in extroversion where California is #38.

Maybe what we experienced was that a lot of the open to new ideas people (yourself included) were in the same room(s) at Health 2.0, and from my observation, a lot of them were from the mid-Atlantic region.

I posted an article about the study regarding different States' personalities here:

http://www.tedeytan.com/tag/place-matters

I am tempted to set up a ZeeMap that would have Health 2.0 users report their BFI score by region.....maybe a collaboration project with Matthew and Indu?

[Vijay Goel, M.D.]

Similar to what Ted mentioned, I'm not sure California is a huge factor in the equation...yet anyway, as many of the participants exist across the US, from Boston to MN, to Seattle and Silicon Valley.

What you did see strongly was that this was a gathering of folks interested in the Edge, where most conferences are gatherings of folks solidly within the mainstream of their industry.

The Edge in health is about putting patients/consumers at the center, rather than payers and employers...I think the decentralization/ democratization of healthcare is the interesting state of mind that we'll get to track as things unfold.