Matthew Holt, the author of this presentation on Health 2.0, is the founder of The Health Care Blog and the Health 2.0 Conference, an event that has defined a new paradigm for ehealth and brings together a new generation of creative thought leaders. This year, the Health 2.0 Conference will be held jointly with the Center for Information Therapy on April 22-23, 2009 in Boston.
My Reaction to Health 2.0 and the Convergence with Information Therapy:
Health 2.0 makes Information Therapy practical and possible. Health 2.0 is about individuals creating and sharing more of themselves online in a way that improves their own health, the health of others they are connected to, and the health of the community as a whole.
Information therapy is based on the idea that what we think and believe — the content of our minds — can influence our health, either directly or through our behavior. We can change and influence the content of our minds and therefore also our health through information media.
Personalized health, however, is highly diverse, and if we had to design the right information therapy for the right person at the right time, we would never finish the job. So how does Health 2.0 make information therapy possible?
The needs in health care are complex, personalized, and ever changing. How can information therapy derived from a scripted template ever fully address them? Without Health 2.0, the greater the number and diversity of people with health needs, the more infinitely complex the situation becomes.
Health 2.0, on the other hand, changes the information therapy equation. The participants are co-creators, selectors, navigators, recommenders, and reviewers of content, so the more people involved and the greater their diversity, the more possible it is to meet an ever greater diversity of needs.
While some traditionalists might argue about the need for evidence-based information, the reality is that rich and diverse Health 2.0 communities are enabling an acceleration of evidence gathering. In the social media world, randomized controlled trials or A/B and multivariate experiments on the impact of information and ideas on user behavior are conducted every day.
This same quantitative and experimental methodology of the modern Web 2.0 Internet, when applied in Health 2.0, will start to advance our knowledge about information therapy, so that we may discover how the right information, at the right time, and in the right way can truly improve health.