By Susannah Fox

Jen McCabe Gorman drew a picture at HealthCampDC last that I really liked. Luckily, I found this image of her Medicine 2.0 presentation, so nobody has to decipher my sketch.

The one difference is that, on Friday, Jen pointed out that the outer square ("content") is Health 1.0 and Health 2.0 begins with the "community" square. After reading her research paper, I now understand that the next inner square is Health 3.0, or content + community + commerce and the final, innermost square is Health 4.0, which would add coherence to the equation. Health 4.0 in this model is the "evolutionary stage connect[ing] the real world of brick-and-mortar systems with the virtual world of online services."

The paper is well worth a read, whether you agree with this model or not. I’m going to have to think about the following points, for example:

Another weakness of current Health 2.0 initiatives is the tendency of communities to attract similar people. Many focus on connecting "like-minds," relatively homogeneous groups such as patients with the same diagnosis or physicians in the same subspecialty. Similar groups then generate very similar content. Users become settled and ‘comfortable’ and thus less inclined to venture out and advocate for other consumer groups and sytemic change.

Which groups did they have in mind when they wrote that? ACOR.org has been held up as a great example of an information resource. Yes, they are homogeneous (98% white) but are ACOR members less likely to advocate for systemic change? I wouldn’t say that to e-patient Dave’s face (or Deborah Bell’s, or Gilles Frydman’s…)

Again, read the paper and then sharpen your critiques because I have to hand it to Jen and her co-presenter, Maarten den Braber, who went completely 2.0 for the event. I couldn’t make it to Toronto (hey Gunther, how about not scheduling it for the first week of school next year?) but I can still read their paper, view their slides, and follow the comments.

Jen and the whole Nexthealth crew make me wish I could spend a semester in the Netherlands — or as e-patient Dave recently wrote, What is it with the Dutch?

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