HEALTH2.0: User Generated Healthcare, Health2.0FAQ (by Matthew) with UPDATE

This is the FAQ about the Health2.0 Conference, in San Francisco, September 20. the conference website is here

QUICK UPDATE: We're very pleased to announce that Peter Neupert, VP Health Solutions Group Microsoft will be joining us at Health 2.0 San Francisco: User Generated Healthcare. Peter will be speaking on "The Role of the Consumer Aggregators" panel.  Peter replaces Microsoft worldwide health director Bill Crounse MD.

Also, we've heard from a number of deserving healthcare folks in countries around the world who would very much like to attend Health 2.0 but who lack the means necessary to make the trip. If you or your company would be willing to sponsor airfare and lodging for a healthcare professional from a developing country traveling to San Francisco we'd like to talk to you. Sponsoring a single physician or technologist can have a huge impact in thousands of people's lives. You can email John Irvine regarding that.

For news and updates on Health 2.0 related business, you can go sign up for the THCB UPDATE newsletter.

Q. What is Health2.0 and why are we running a conference about it?

The term Web2.0 has been around since 2003. The O’Reilly organization both coined the term and created a definition that year, and then they went on to create the Web2.0 Conference. Meanwhile over at The Health Care Blog and in his by now relatively long consulting career, Matthew Holt (your author—I’ll be switching to “I & we” from now on) has been following technology in health care since the early 1990s. Some of my eHealth era reminisces were relatively poignant...

Towards the middle of 2006 several start-ups began targeting health care using Web2.0 technologies such as wikis, mash-ups, video, blogs communities, and user-generated data. And to be fair Wondir which has since been sucked into the Revolution Health vortex started a now seemingly defunct blog called Health 2.0 in late 2005. In early November 2006 I did a podcast with 3 Health2.0 companies on THCB, and the community was beginning to emerge. Two events crystallized this for me—an article in Business2.0 (part of CNNMoney these days) which was the first “mainstream” featuring of Health2.0 outside the blogs, and the December 2006 Healthcamp “unconference” run by James Littlejohn among others in which several of us got talking about the topic. (Here’s a photo with Enoch Choi standing & talking and me apparently falling asleep on my hand at the far end of the table! And here’s my Health2.0 partner Indu Subaiya eating health food!).

Indu and I started kicking around the idea of a next steps on Health2.0 in January and after a few changes in people, partnerships and timing we created an advisory board, and talked about holding a conference. After discussions with a couple of original charter sponsors (thanks to Mike Haymaker at Cisco, and Daniel Palestrant at Sermo for taking the plunge) we committed to holding a conference on September 20, 2007 in San Francisco. (It’ll be in the Hilton San Francisco downtown, and there’s a special room-rate if you hurry!)

We’re also trying to help define Health2.0.

Q. You mean there’s not a definition of Health2.0 yet?

Actually there are several. Defining Health2.0 is also a user-generated phenomenon. You can choose your own definition. Scott Shreeve has one here. Jos Bakker from Philips disagrees and uses another more limited one—his is largely based on the O’Reilly definition of Web2.0. Ingenix CEO Andy Slavitt has a third. David Kibbe from AAFP has recently been talking about it too (I’ll find his charts link soon), and Cleveland Clinic’s John Sharp gave a good talk on it a earlier this summer.

Our definition is currently focusing on user-generated aspects of Web2.0 within health care but not directly interacting with the mainstream health care system. That means, a) search, b) communities, c) tools for individual and group consumer use. But clearly there are blurring boundaries between all these, and the question of connecting Health2.0 user-generated content to the wider health care system—which hasn’t exactly adopted Web1.0 with a flourish yet—is still open.

Part of the conference deliverable will be a report that we’re currently writing. There is huge room for debate about whether we’re talking about limited use of tools and technologies or a wider movement to change the whole healthcare system—or perhaps if it’s just all buzzwords with no substance.

Q. So what is the goal of the conference?

The goal of the conference is to get the leaders in Health2.0 to meet each other, and to meet “mainstream” health care organization players, technology people, finance people and anyone with an interest in the topic. We’re going to hear from the big online consumer aggregators (Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, WebMD) about their views on the use of Health2.0 in the future of online health. And we’re having leading providers & health plans like Kaiser Permanente, Regence BCBS and BCBS Minnesota tell us about their intentions to use these tools. We’ll also have leading pharma companies, health care technology companies, venture capitalists and prognosticators give us their views on where this is all heading and who’s going to be providing what to whom. Perhaps the key question is, Will Health2.0 grow into an independent industry sector, be subsumed into the current healthcare system, or create a new hybrid landscape?

Health2.0 User-Generated Healthcare is also about showing the audience the very latest innovations from big and small Health2.0 technology companies. It will include four panels with rapid -fire demos highlighting the best technology from innovative companies:

> fostering new online patient communities
> designing health-focused search engines
> connecting physicians to each other
> providing health care tools for consumers (including administrative and clinical tools)

Here’s the agenda for a packed day. Participants will receive the report as well as attendance for the whole day. And other than Matthew no one gets to use Powerpoint!

Q. Sounds fun, but what else is going on?

Besides the panels and the punditry, the conference will also feature an interactive voting and audience participation system (from Visiontree), several media, blogging and webcasting participants, and exhibits during networking breaks from leading companies.

We’ll be sitting in half rounds (no difficult to maneuver through “theater seating” here) and we’ll have lots of moderated audience participation in every session. Everyone gets to contribute—no real barriers between the panelists, the audience, exhibitors or press here! And it’s all in one big room—so you can dip in and out of exhibits and breaks as you like. In addition at lunchtime we’re breaking for a one hour “unconference” in which anyone can take over a table and run their own discussion (Please let us know first, so we can tell everyone who's where!!) Finally, there’s the chance to stay and have a drink and meet more people at the end of the day, and also at a night before event (please email us separately for that one, as it has more limited space).

Before and after the conference there’ll be online exhibits of demonstrations, podcasts and video casts of upcoming speakers, a social networking site for people to meet each other on, and we’ll have self-organizing dinner groups that night.

Q. How do I sign up?

Go to Health2.0 Registration. The cost is $950 for the day, the report and all the online activities. (It’s only $699 if you’re academic, charity, Foundation or government—but no, working for a huge hospital organization that runs a teaching hospital doesn’t count as “academic”).

Q. Can my company sponsor or exhibit?

Sure. We’ve had lots of interest in this, but we’ve moved to a bigger room to satisfy more demand that we originally thought we’d have. There are a variety of sponsorship opportunities and we also are having a limited number of exhibitors—those tables will be in the main conference room and manned during the breaks, but the exhibitors will also be full attendees. Email us for details.

In addition our friend Fard Johnmar is setting up a video cast series on Digital Health with the folks at Scribe Media and is looking for sponsors. Email us and we’ll pass you along to him.

There'll also be some press and bloggers, and some video-crews there. If you want to meet them, let us know.

Q. Where is it?

September 20, 2006 in San Francisco. It’ll be in the Hilton San Francisco downtown, in the Imperial Ballroom, and there’s a special room-rate if you hurry!

Q. I’m speaking, exhibiting, blogging; Is it OK for me to bring a colleague or two?

Sorry but this is a relatively small conference (our original aim was around 150 attendees and it’ll be slightly larger) and we have over 35 speakers already. If you’re one of those you come for free. Unfortunately if each speaker brought one friend, our economics would go south in a hurry. Anyone else can of course sign up as a regular attendee. Email us if you have questions or want to discuss.

Q. I/my friend/my CEO knows more about this than anyone on earth and just has to be on a panel

We have spent a lot of time and effort figuring out great panelists. But there is no way we can accommodate everyone. Instead, please keep emailing us about interesting people, ideas and companies and we’ll consider them for podcasts, interviews, the report, and future participation in conferences. But please keep it gentle, or at least funny! And honestly, it's very unlikely that we'll have room for another panelist.

Q. Really no more room?

Well not quite. We are having one slot on the "Social Media" panel that we'll be having a "people's choice award" to choose. Details coming up on The Health Care Blog. If you have a fantastic site that we haven't heard in that list, let us know and we may add it

We are also NOT going down the path of “pay us and you get a speaking slot/track”. It may be hubris but we think that we know a fair bit about the space and hope that our choices provide some “value-add”.

Q. C’mon, you’re not that purer than pure!

No of course not. We’re both consultants; Indu works mainly with Physic, a new VC fund, and Matthew works with many health care tech companies—including a couple that are new and presenting at the conference (Careseek & Enhanced Medical Decisions). And yes, if they do well he hopes to do well too! But he chose them to work with and to be on the panel because he thinks they’re very, very interesting.

Q. I’d love to come but I’m working for an unfunded start-up and have already maxxed out my credit cards; I’m a student; my dog ate my checkbook…can you help?

We’re nice people and we remember being all of the above. We have a limited number of spaces for these types of category on a case-by-case basis. We’ve set up some different rates (including a volunteer category).  Email us but please realize that we can’t get everyone who wants to come into the room.

Q. Are you the only people doing this? 

Running this conference exactly? Yes. Talking or presenting about Health2.0, err…no.

Here's a blog from a Hungarian medical student on Medicine2.0. Here's Uri Ginzberg's Medical 2.0 blog, and here's the Health2.0 wiki run by Johannes Ernst, who's on our advisory board.

The recent HealthCare Unbound conference (at which I was a panelist on PHRs) featured a session on Health2.0.  The upcoming Information Therapy conference in Park City, Utah (October 8–10, 2007) will feature another session on health2.0 which Indu and Matthew are helping to run—and lots of great information on the related concept of Information Therapy.  We expect there’ll be lots more, including a second generation of the Health2.0 Conference that we’ll be putting on early in 2008 (details to come).

Q: I have come up with the most brilliant ever conceived of idea for a new Health 2.0 startup. If funded my idea will revolutionize healthcare/eradicate the national deficit/cure [disease name here.] Do you know somebody who can help find me funding?

Yes, we know some VCs. Let us know about said idea and we'll see if we can help.

Q. Why has it taken you so long to get this FAQ up here? 

This summer I have had a huge consulting project, decided to run this conference and am also getting married (perhaps an even bigger production)!  Don't worry for the conference I have lots of help, but I promised my colleagues the FAQ some time ago, and just spent a Sunday morning writing it!

Q. Will you update this FAQ often?

I hope so!