I have written several posts about the conference Health 2.0: User-Generated Healthcare 2008 October 22 – 23 held at The Marriott, San Francisco. I was impressed by many of the products and services demoed there (most particularly by the suite of services of Private Access, which really could revolutionize for the better the currently antiquated clinical trials patient recruitment process).

I have since poked around in the blogosphere reading coverage of the conference (and in the writing of this post have undergone my first experience sifting through dribs and drabs of Twitter and found sorting through tweets more trouble than it was worth) and would like to comment here on who was not at the conference.

It has been interesting to read the pans and defenses, charges of hucksterism aimed at one of the co-founders of the conference, Matthew Holt. In this final post on the conference, I would like to discuss what groups were either not represented at all or that had only a minor presence at the conference and to suggest why they should consider attending the next gathering.

I write from a totally disinterested position, having no commercial connection to the conference and finding much of it in fact a bit tiresome in the self-congratulatory tone and hyping of the whole concept of Health 2.0, which is really just applying standard Web 2.0 practices to the health care industry. But there were fascinating technologies on display and opportunities to chat with those representing the developers of them.

Below I will list groups that almost certainly should consider attending. Let us use as a case study the one company at the conference that seemed to me to actually be innovating and offering something of value to medicine, Private Access.

As mentioned above and as I have written before, Private Access is a firm that all those interested in matters of privacy, Internet Security, clinical research and clinical trials, bioethics, patient rights and disease advocacy should take a look at. As I watched CEO Robert Shelton’s demo, I kept wishing that representatives of such professional organizations as the Society of Research Administrators, the National Council of University Research Administrators, the Society of Clinical Research Associates, the Midwest Nursing Research Society, the Eastern Nursing Research Society, the American Academy of Nursing and the American Nursing Informatics Association had been at the conference. This was just the kind of technology that such groups could fruitfully employ to the benefit of patients, their members and their clienteles and I lament that experts in such fields were not there to ask questions that would have elucidated matters for the rest of the large audience.

Indeed, it is interesting what professional organizations were present and which were not. HIMSS (the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society) and the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists were represented, but the American Health Information Management Association, the American Hospital Association, and the Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) were not. Some individual hospitals and healthcare systems were there, but a larger contingent of health care administrators (such as CIOs and CFOs) could have attended and profited professionally by so doing. There was no representation by the American College of Healthcare Executives, for instance.

The Medical Library Association was not represented and neither was the American Library Association despite the fact that libraries play a key role in consumer health education. I would think that members of the Association of College and Research Libraries, the Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries, the Association of American Medical Colleges, the Association of American Universities and the American Medical Association would also have found many of the discussions interesting given that so many of the proceedings had to do with issues such as clinician social networks and Science 2.0-like developments that are changing radically how front-line clinicians, researchers, medical educators, health science students , and patients are interacting.

Academia (e.g., those in such fields as health economics and health policy) was poorly represented at the conference save for individuals and it was too bad that such groups as the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Heart Association, the American Lung Association, the American Diabetes Association, and the AARP were not there. After watching the Private Access presentation I was heartened to learn of its partnership with the Genetic Alliance and wished there had been more representatives of such advocacy groups as the Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Association present, given the extensive discussion of online patient communities such as Patients Like Me at the conference and the theme of the conference, User-Generated Healthcare (at which such controversial firms such as 23andme and Navigenics touted their services).

The medical publishing industry was somewhat represented (e.g., by Elsevier and Springer). I kept thinking as of library-related movements somewhat related to the Health 2.0 movement such as the Rethinking Resource Sharing Initiative and the upcoming conference Health Content08:

Particularly the session:

“Let’s Get Personal: Genetic-based medicine. Personalized health records. High-end medical concierge services. See how the trends in personalized medicine are being turned into big opportunities for medical publishers.” I wish I could go!

This is all really fascinating.

So how does this all relate to search? Because the companies showcased at Health 2.0 are all either creating or distributing content that we all might end up end up searching for or are engendering discussion of such matters as privacy versus science versus profit, open access versus proprietary systems and so on. All of that touches all of us who write for or follow this blog.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 4th, 2008 at 12:15 pm and is filed under News, Reviews, Verticals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.