In 2008, I asked for this community’s help in choosing which sessions to attend at the Chronic Disease Care conference sponsored by the California HealthCare Foundation. I loved the input I got and wrote 3 posts on what I learned about spreading improvement in care, how to include patient voices, and how to discuss emerging trends (even if it makes people’s heads spin).
I need your help once again. Medicine 2.0 is running three concurrent tracks, plus a host of poster presentations, on Sept. 17-18 and I don’t know enough about some of the topics or speakers to make an informed choice. Please check out the program (HTML or PDF only – sorry!) and let me know if something catches your eye.
Actually, the program is not PDF-only, the html version is at http://www.medicine20congress.com/ocs/index.php/med/med2011/schedConf/schedule. The beauty of using the official conference site is that in the HTML schedule each title links to an abstract, and each abstract to the profile page of the speaker/authors on the Medicine 2.0 social network.
Speaking of the program and the social network, I noted that a) there is no title/abstract for your keynote in the system, b) you are not registered for the conference and therefore there is no profile page for you, so people cannot connect with you. Please contact Larry or me for a link to sign up for this!
We have invested a lot of time in building the social network to enable participants to network with each other, and it would be a shame if invited speakers were not part of this! Thanks! And we all look forward to your title-less closing keynote (I guess the fact that there is no title or abstract heightens the anticipation 🙂
Ladies and gentleman, one of the most forthright people in all of health care and the founder of the Medicine 2.0 franchise: Gunther Eysenbach!
Larry Chu and his team have been so amazing at anticipating every question I had about being a speaker that I never thought to register — lulled by their awesomeness, I guess. Seriously, I’m not sure I’ve ever been treated so well by conference hosts so I’m sorry to hear that I’ve been remiss in providing information. Plus, I love connecting with people and will go this minute to register for the social network.
My keynote, “Peer-to-peer Healthcare,” will focus on how the internet is transforming the pursuit of health by providing us with access to information and each other. Peer-to-peer healthcare acknowledges that patients and caregivers know things — about themselves, about each other, about treatments — and they want to share what they know to help other people. Technology helps to surface and organize that knowledge to make it useful for as many people as possible.
Larry & his team created this video introduction to my research for the Medicine 2.0 conference when I was at Stanford last spring:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=PWgtFZtOxX4
An update to my own post: I heard from a couple of people via Twitter who let me know where I could read more about their sessions (thank you!).
I also assigned myself homework in preparation for the Stanford Summit, which will be held on Sept. 16 (prior to Medicine 2.0, which takes place Sept. 17-18). Abraham Verghese will be the opening keynote, so I’ve set about reading as much of his writing as I can, beginning with “Cutting for Stone” (perfect for my vacation since it’s a novel), then “My Own Country” (a medical page-turner even though I know how it ends), and his blog posts on TheAtlantic.com: http://www.abrahamverghese.com/blogs.asp
I hope that he addresses technology head-on in his remarks since he has a wonderful, nuanced, skeptical view.
Since I’m the closing keynote for the conference, I’ll try to be a bookend and provide data showing how technology does not replace clinicians as the #1 source of diagnostic and treatment information. Instead, technology can surface and organize all the knowledge & observations that patients and caregivers hold, which has otherwise been lost to clinicians, lost to other patients.
> technology does not replace clinicians
> as the #1 source of diagnostic and treatment information.
THAT’s a slide by itself. Thanks.
> Instead, technology can surface and organize
> all the knowledge & observations
> that patients and caregivers hold,
> which has otherwise been lost to clinicians,
> lost to other patients.
And there’s another.
I’m gonna start calling you Susannah Slideworthy.:–)