Health 2.0 - Clay Shirky

I am at the Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. There are over 800 people here.

Clay Shirky has just keynoted the conference. I managed to catch some of his talk. What did I take away from the session? The power in HealthCare is switching to the people. Information Engineering is available to individuals to organize more quickly and more effectively than the professionals in Health Care. This is significant because the consumers outnumber the professionals by over 100 to 1.

Providers can see real benefits from adopting social technologies. Talking with Enoch Choi, of the Palo Alto Medical Foundation and MedHelp, he cites being able to be up to 10 times more efficient by being able to do an "e-consult" online.

Consumers are at the centre of the HealthCare system but are typically treated as the outsider. There is a massive amount of information in the Health Care system but the consumer is the last person to be able to see their own information.

We are seeing an industry going through transformational change and it is a change that the professionals in the industry are unable to control.

We have to realize the tremendous opportunity that comes from embracing the network effects that are being unleashed.

I will also be tweeting at the conference. Check out the #Health2Con tag.

David Kibbe also mentioned SharedHealth out of BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee. This is a Personal Health Record Lite for Providers. This is an interesting development.