Health 2.0 LLC

ndu 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 healthcare using Web 2.0 technologies such as wikis, mash-ups, video, blogs, communities, and user-generated data. And to be fair Wondir which was sucked into the Revolution Health vortex started a now 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.

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 Matthew apparently falling asleep on his hand at the far end of the table! And here’s Indu eating health food!).

Indu and Matthew started kicking around the idea of a next steps on Health2.0 in January 2006 and after a few changes in team, partnerships and timing they created an advisory board, and talked about holding a conference. After discussions with a couple of original charter sponsors (thanks to Mike Haymaker at Cisco, and Daniel Palestrant at Sermo for taking the plunge) they committed to holding a conference on September 20, 2007 in San Francisco. That conference massively exceeded expectations, with nearly 500 attendees, and a hundred more on a wait list. There’s plenty of press reports of the day up on the web.

Then the Health 2.0 “movement” really caught on fire. Indu & Matthew took several smaller “versions” of the conference demo format to other conferences. There was a rash of blog postings, presentations and interest in Health 2.0, some of that captured at the Health 2.0 media room. And the announcement of Healthvault from Microsoft in late 2007 and Google’s announcement of Google Health in February 2008 really fueled excitement about the market.

In response to overwhelming demand and not-a-little prodding from the growing community, two Health 2.0 were held in 2008. The goal of Health 2.0 Conferences is, and remain, to showcase cutting edge innovation, and allow for maximum networking & collaboration. The “Spring Fling” was a smaller scale event, themed around a particular concept. In Spring 2008 the concept was “Connecting Consumers & Providers.” It was held on 3-4 March, 2008 in San Diego. Another sold out crowd of 350 came for two days of demos, discussion, and exploration. All the details are here and you can also see some of the great videos of patient and physician experience that we showed.

At the Fall event on October 22-23, 2008 over 1,000 people saw demos & presentations from across the Health 2.0 waterfront, centered again on User-Generated Healthcare. More details can be found here. There were several really innovative products introduced, an intensive design workshop run by IDEO, the announcement of a new movement around the end of life experience called Engage with Grace, several new videos, including The Great American Health 2.0 Motorcycle Tour, and lots and lots of great networking and conversation. Several of the presentations are captured on Health 2.0 TV and the icyou Health 2.0 Channels.

While the conferences will always remain a focal point, Health 2.0 is also about an on (and off)line community. In 2008 we added a now bursting at the seams Linkedin Health 2.0 Group to the vibrant Facebook group, and continued to showcase interesting developments on the Health2.0 Blog and on The Health Care Blog (which has a more general health care focus)

We also introduced the Health 2.0 Network, which is an active attendee list, ongoing social network, and messaging system for those who have been at the conferences themselves. (Sorry but at the moment you have to be a current or past conference attendee to be on the network). It’s proved a very useful tool for direct business connections

Back at the first Health 2.0 Conference, Marty Tenenbaum suggested the creation of a technology consortium that would accelerate the development of Health 2.0 technologies and companies. After several meetings and discussions, a wiki was born, followed by a first project involving DestinationRx & PHARMAsurveyor. The Accelerator is now a formal consortium with over forty members and lots of vibrant activity. It’s headed by by Julie Murchinson & Aaron Apodaca. You can get more details about it at the web site www.health2accelerator.org

We held our “Spring Fling” conference on April 22-23, 2009 at the Park Plaza Hotel in Boston. Here’s the day’s agenda. We were thrilled to have this be our first joint meeting with our friends from the Center for Information Therapy, which was titled Health 2.0 Meets Ix.

The latest Health 2.0 Conference was held in San Francisco on October 6-7, 2009 at the Concourse Design Center. Details on the agenda are located here. This was a successful follow up to our Fall conference last year…different location but still 1,000 attendees along with our prestigious keynote speaker, Aneesh Chopra (Chief Technology Officer, U.S. Govt.).

We’re delighted to announce our first international foray. Health 2.0 Europe 2010 will be held in Paris on April 6-7, 2010. It’ll be a one & a half day conference showcasing the best of Europe’s Health 2.0 offerings with lots of American input too. We’re working with Basil Strategies’ principal (and veteran international eHealth leader) Denise Silber, and several of our colleagues in Europe on programming. Details can be found here.