Health 2.0 San Francisco, September 2011, "Son et Lumiere"

This post comes to you from the Health 2.0 conference in San Francisco.  The main conference kicks off today, but it has been preceded by a week of code-a-thons and a variety of other events, including HealthCamp and the four-track pre-conference yesterday (Health Law 2.0, Patients 2.0, Doctors 2.0, Employers 2.0).  I moderated one the of the Health Law 2.0 panels, and shook up some of my brothers and sisters at the bar by wearing my new Regina Holliday jacket — I've joined the Walking Gallery.  (Follow the links, including the walking gallery back story, to learn more about who Regina is, and what this means; see also Regina's explanation of David Harlow's Friendship Pins jacket.)

You can read more about the pre-conference activities at HealthWorks Collective.

I am interviewing conference attendees this week, asking two questions:

1. What is Health 2.0?

2.  What are you doing to promote data liberation?

I've gotten some interesting answers so far. I'm posting these videos on YouTube, and will upload more throughout the conference, and after (so please be sure to keep checking back if you'd like to learn more about some of the people in attendance, and their perspectives on Health 2.0 and data liberation.

Let me share a couple of vignettes from the material collected thus far: One respondent predicted that in the future, we will not be talking about Health 2.0, it will all just be "health."  (I agree, and those of you who have heard me speak about social media know that I have a similar perspective on that front — in the future, it will simply be considered part of media as a whole.)  One had a different take on data liberation than what I had in mind — his company's data includes the information from the mind of the physician that can be organized and used to support a decision support system that screens/triages ED patients more accurately than staff may be able to do unaided.  And yet another interviewee articulated what is, to my mind, one of the key challenges faced by the Health 2.0 community: the need to pull together disparate projects into a coherent whole so that they may work together to improve individual and population health.

David Harlow
The Harlow Group LLC
Health Care Law and Consulting