HealthCampMd - a recap

Last weekend HealthCampMd took place in Owings Mills. The event was sponsored by Near-Time - The Enterprise 2.0 On Demand platform. Thanks to everyone who turned up and made this a fascinating event.

Parts of the event were captured on Stickam. The recorded videos are here.

Melanie Swan, a Futurist, joined the event and took the participants through a visualization exercise to consider how Healthcare might look in 2050. I look forward to Melanie posting the output from those exercises.

Mike Cariaso gave us a fascinating tour of SNPedia. This is his labor of love that applies a wiki to help decode the meaning of your DNA. Mike's site provides tools to analyze the output file provided by 23andMe and other genetic testing services. These services have been in the news this week with a cease and desist letter coming from the State of California. SNPedia is not performing any testing but the use of wiki technology is fascinating. The service links to public research on the Human Genome and as more people use the service and add clarifying information or pointers to new research the wiki becomes more valuable for everyone involved.

Other discussions that took place during the day included using Twitter in HealthCare. PFAnderson has put together a great presentation on using Twitter in Healthcare that is available on Slideshare:

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Ons of the other attendees, Mark Martens demonstrated work he had been doing at Pantometrics to improve Healthcare through the encouragement of regular cardiovascular exercise. This led to an in depth discussion about business models in HealthCare. Is the industry really setup to adopt healthful behaviors and can the industry afford to provide incentives to members for following good health practices. One view that emerged is that the business models of the incumbent insurers may not support large scale adoption of incentive programs. However, new entrants could make this an important part of their business model in order to avoid incurring hefty treatment costs. There was plenty of discussion about Personal Health Records and the privacy implications. The discussion also considered how open standards such as OpenId, OAuth and microformats could be used to tackle some of the issues around securely sharing health data in an open and scalable manner. At the conclusion of the meeting it was agreed that we should hold future events. The options for this include:

• Hold a HealthCamp event at Web 2.0 Expo - New York in September as part of the Web 2.Open channel
• Hold a HealthCamp event in October alongside the Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco
• Hold a follow up HealthCamp event in central Washington DC in the latter part of 2008. HealthCampDc has been setup as a placeholder for this on barcamp.org