By Matthew Holt

So the party's over, the buntings are down, the #health2con tweets—more than 3,000 of them—are drying up but recorded here, and the Health 2.0 & Ix teams have returned to their respective coasts. Even though this is the smaller of the two annual Health 2.0 Conferences, because we were co-hosting this one with Ix, it was not a small event. There were more than 500 people, some 60 main stage speakers & demo-ers, another 12 or so in the Deep Dives and Launch, some 90 people at the Health 2.0 Accelerator meeting in the morning, and a whole lot of deep conversations going on in the Exhibit Hall, in the corridors and at the party at the top of the Prudential Tower—where else can you talk Health 2.0 & Ix and watch live base-runners at Fenway park (albeit they looked like ants!).

If you were there, please give us your feedback in the survey (but only if you were there please!)

First, some thank-yous. We’re deeply grateful to:

• Everyone who came. We’re a real community now, and the interactions amongst us (whether a 2.0er or IXer or both) are starting to produce some tangible results, and also more importantly a feeling that we can make the changes in health care we’re all seeking.
• Our sponsors, especially our flagship sponsor Kaiser Permanente. Special shout out to KP’s Patrice Smith and Kimberly Stansell who (working with Ix's Emily Jacobs) put on quite the soiree at the Prudential Center. But to all our Platinum sponsors (A.D.A.M, American Well, Hello Health/MyCa, Philips, Sage, & Microsoft Healthvault) and our Deep Dive, Gold and Silver sponsors—many thanks. Running a conference is not a cheap business, and without your support this community wouldn’t be together.
• All our speakers and demo-ers. We put every one of them through the wringer in advance of our conferences, and we hope that it showed. But thanks to everyone for taking part. A couple of additional thanks from me personally to Ted Eytan and his team for getting a fabulous demo together on very late notice (and within that KP bureaucracy!!) and to Jack Wennberg for being Jack Wennberg, and e-Patient Dave for really exposing himself and his dance moves! And of course to our friends & fellow moderators Scott Shreeve & Jane Sarasohn-Kahn.

As ever there were a couple of flaws for which we apologize. We had a serious problem with some broken amplification equipment on day 1, and the amount of tweeting and texting did interfere with the audio on both days. We’ll be working with our AV partners to improve this next time. We also know that some of you didn’t have badges ready. We changed registration systems leading up to the conference and had a resulting glitch. Again our apologies, and we’ll learn for next time.

Lots of people have already written their impressions about the conference. Here are just a few from Josh Seidman (day 1 and day 2), Jack Beaudoin at Healthcare IT News, the ever optimistic Brian Klepper, the ever cynical John Moore and the MobiNews photo essay

Finally my personal impressions. These can be summed up in three themes.

Community: Health 2.0 Meets Ix brought together people determined to change health care. We don't all agree exactly how, but we share a common vision of putting people in charge of their care, and delivering them the tools to do that. Many people cried BS on the debate format and to be fair it was a little stylized. There are tensions between Health 2.0 and Ix but the commonalities far outweigh them and that’s obvious.

Platforms, or perhaps I mean “unplatforms”. Of the many exciting new applications demoed, I thought that many were driving hard towards using platforms or as Tim O’Reilly calls it “software above the level of a single device”. Three examples, the Medzio iPhone platform from A.D.A.M (see JSK’s review here), the Mayo/Microsoft Health Manager collaboration, the Hello Health platform which will launch with an open API….but there are many more. As Health 2.0 matures we can expect many more collaborations and mash-ups (such as the change:healthcare/Kryptiq/Sage collaboration shown at Launch!), and as Ix develops we can expect far more user-generated content and data included within it.

Vision: We need to be thinking about how to take our collective message to the health care system and to society—and we’ll be working on that. But unquestionably the room was full of people who think that there needs to be a fundamental change in how the health care system works, and not just tinkering around the edges of financing, nor just changes in how the current delivery system works. Health care needs to use the tools of self-service, data liquidity/integration and communication to really put the patient and the home in the center of the delivery system. No more should the patient be “the football” as Danny Sands said they are now. We’ve got to stop playing football and start, I don’t know, synchronized swimming or something that’s better choreographed. Suggestions for a better metaphor below please!

Final thought. Esther Dyson almost always says the right thing. We should be paying for health, not for health care, and we should take $5 billion and train more gym teachers….