The past 18 months or so have been a tremendous whirlwind of innovation, trial and error, new ideas, change and progress in the online healthcare space -- what many now call Health 2.0.
Dozens of new companies have launched and secured funding from venture capitalists. Consumers continue to use the Internet as a critical tool to manage their health care. We now have our own Health 2.0 conference this month that is sold out! And the most influential media outlets are now covering this trend.
This week's Economist Magazine has a full-page trend piece by Jeanette Borzo titled, Health 2.0: Technology and society: Is the outbreak of cancer videos, bulimia
blogs and other forms of “user generated” medical information a healthy
trend?" which OrganizedWisdom was happy to be featured in.
From the article:
To gauge the size of this snowball, look at OrganizedWisdom, a firm based in New York. It launched in October 2006 as a health-care Wikipedia of sorts: a site to which consumers could contribute their own nuggets of health wisdom. Yet after only a few months it transformed itself into an index of the existing web content. The firm's founders had discovered that there already was quite enough user-generated health information online; the real problem was finding the good stuff.
The explosion of user-generated content in health care is, in part, the result of broader internet trends: more and more people have broadband access and the tools for creating content are getting easier to use. New software, for instance, makes it easy to launch and maintain a site such as FluWikie (which provides information about preparing for an influenza pandemic), and digital cameras make it a snap to take and upload photos of, say, epigastric hernia surgery.
But there are other drivers, too. Those with multiple chronic conditions, such as diabetes and depression, or lesser-known illnesses such as chronic fatigue syndrome, are anxious to get tips from others in similar situations.
Other Health Bloggers who we respect have already been blogging about it (here and here) and with the upcoming Health 2.0 Conference (which we'll be speaking at), we suspect there will be a lot more conversation this month on the topic of how technology, social media and collaboration can help improve some of today's most challenging health care issues.
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