World Health Care Congress on Consumer Connectivity

An unexpected turn of events last week led to me being invited to participate in a session at the World Health Care Congress Leadership Summit on Consumer Connectivity. that is taking place in San Diego on February 23-24th. TriZetto is leading a session on "Powering Consumer Engagement through Integrated Health Care Management." This is going to be a crazy week because I am in the middle of preparing for HealthCampDc which is taking place in Washington DC on Friday February 27th.

The invitation to attend the Summit came about because CareFirst is a major customer of Trizetto. Their software powers enrollment and claims management for a significant portion of CareFirst's 3.3 million members. I was asked to represent CareFirst in their session.

The summit is going to be looking at social networks and other tools to fuel consumer engagement in the management of their health care. This has been a keen interest of mine and is behind the HealthCamp series of events I have been organizing.

Representing CareFirst at this event represents somewhat of a conundrum for me. My background in the evolution of Web 2.0 - what do we label the latest web technologies these days? has put me on the leading edge of web strategy at CareFirst. At this event I am representing CareFirst, but my views may not be those that are adopted across the company. However, they are at the core of my thinking when discussing and planning the evolution of the company's web strategy.

I think this leads me to presenting a talk, which I will post later on Slideshare, that outlines the high level CareFirst strategy but also blends in my personal views. My views on health care have evolved through discussions at various HealthCamp related events.

I feel it is more important to promote an approach to establishing participatory health care. After all that is the core idea behind HealthCamp - To promote the conversation around re-inventing Health Care using social networks, open standards and the latest Internet and Mobile technologies.

I hope I can encourage more people to establish HealthCamp events as a result of attending this event. A number of other Health 2.0 "Agitators" are going to be there. Scott Shreeve and Bob Cauffield are among some of the Twitter users that will be at the Summit. I am certain there will be plenty of others. Bob and I are aiming to discuss the planning of HealthCampWv. It looks like the hashtag for the event is emerging as #WHCC. so you can follow the event on search.twitter.com using that as a search term. If the tag changes I will put out a tweet that uses the old and the new hashtag.

If you are a fellow tweeter at the event then please come say hello or ping me @ekivemark. I will also be posting blogs from the event about interesting sessions.

Finally, if you are going to be in the Washington DC area on Friday February 27th sign up for HealthCampDc and join in this vitally important discussion on the re-invention of health care and the engagement of consumers and patients. Go to http://healthcampdc.eventbrite.com to sign up.