Q. What is Health2.0 and why are we running conferences about it?

The term Web2.0 has been around since 2003. The O’Reilly organization both coined the term and created a definition that year, and then they went on to create the Web 2.0 Conference. Meanwhile over at The Health Care Blog and in his by now relatively long consulting career, Matthew Holt has been following technology in health care since the early 1990s. Some of his eHealth era reminisences were relatively poignant…Indu Subaiya, a healthcare consultant and entrepreneur was similarly starting to follow Web 2.0 trends and their impact on health as she embarked on designing a prototype for a medical record-sharing website.

Towards the middle of 2006 several start-ups began targeting health care using Web 2.0 technologies such as wikis, mash-ups, video, blogs communities, and user-generated data. And to be fair Wondir which has since been sucked into the Revolution Health vortex started a now seemingly defunct blog called Health 2.0 in late 2005. In early November 2006 Matthew did a podcast with 3 Health 2.0 companies on THCB, and the community was beginning to emerge.  (From now on Matthew is switching to “I” & “me”)

Two events crystallized this. First an article in Business 2.0 (part of CNNMoney these days) which was the first "mainstream" mention of Health 2.0 outside the blogs, and the December 2006 Healthcamp "unconference” in which several of us got talking about the topic. (Here’s a photo with Enoch Choi standing & talking and me apparently falling asleep on my hand at the far end of the table! And here’s Health2.0 co-founder Indu Subaiya eating health food!).

Continue at the Health 2.0 site