Sunday, December 17, 2006

Healthcare Blogging Summit 2006

Washington DC is the place to be for health care bloggers. Tomorrow the first Healthcare Blogging Summit is being held in conjunction with the Consumer Health World expo. I'll be participating as a panel member on the "Facts and Issues" session. I'm looking forward to meeting in person a number of health care bloggers that I regularly follow though RSS.

My family and I arrived over the weekend for a short holiday weekend before the conference. We took the kids to the National Zoo on Saturday with friends who came into the city from Martinsburg (don't miss the PandaCAM - we watched it for weeks before we came) . Today we spent time along the Mall at the Smithsonian where 6 year olds (and 2 year old sisters and adult parents) are in heaven - dinosaurs, mummies, rockets, airplanes, etc.

While reviewing information form the conference I thought it would be helpful to aggregate a few of the pre-conference (and post-conference) posts and interesting posts/topics that might come up at the conference. If you have one that you would like added please email me. Heck, I might even try out some live blogging during the event. (REMEMBER: If you blog about the event tag it as Healthcare Blogging Summit or HBS2006.)

Preconference Discussion:
  • Carol Kirshner at Driving In Traffic and Josh Hallett at Hyku comment on a recent Florida story about a disgruntled patient and the impact it might have on the Florida hospital involved. I'd like to pose a hypothetical to Nick Jacob and ask him how he'd respond to this on his blog. Nick's response during his panel session was to point out Windber current infection rate is 1% while the national average is 8%.
  • Fard Johnmar at Envision Solutions has released highlights from the "Taking the Pulse of the Healthcare Blogsphere" survey conducted this past summer. The press release includes the following highlight information (download the survey results here):
    • 214 healthcare bloggers took at least a portion of the survey, which was fielded between July 31 and September 29, 2006. 171 answered every question in the poll.
    • 61% of respondents write about their personal experiences.
    • 39% of those surveyed hide their identity to protect their privacy, patient confidentiality or themselves. (As a health lawyer interested in privacy issues this stat interests me)
    • Nearly 40% of healthcare bloggers report that the most important reason they decided to start their blog was to share their opinions or educate others.
  • Business Blogs Now highlights the Summit and the growing number of health professional bloggers.
  • Spare Change talks about the conference location and the "Taking the Pulse of the Healthcare Blogosphere." I agree that the Omni is a great location with wonderful services and I'm interested to see the results of the survey being unveiled tomorrow.
  • Unity Stoakes of Organized Wisdom will be attending and bring the perspective of one of the new Web 2.0 health companies.
Conference Thoughts:

Enjoyed Steve Rubel's presentation which looked at the Galaxy, Stars, Planets, Shooting Stars, etc. of health care bloggers. I was especially struck by the statistics he provided on "who do you trust" and the fact that 68% are "persons like yourself." He also had a great slide showing the shift from 1992-2002 corporate built web to todays 2002 and beyond web built by individuals. He used information from Comscore Media Metrix and a chart from Washington Post article, "New Trends in Online Traffic."

Steve also pointed out that he believes that blogging as an activity has peaked as a result of statistics he provided using Technorati. The chart showed the leveling off of post volume over the last few months. It will be interesting to see if this trend continues.

More to come . . .

Post Conference Discussion:

Note:
If you are going to be in Washington Monday evening don't miss the Blogger Wonk starting at 7pm at Open City. I'm sorry I'll have to pass because we have to be back in Charleston WV Tuesday a.m. and plan to leave right after the conference. So fare on the RSVP list are: Katya Andresen, Leslie Jump, Debbie Weil, Josh Hallett, Marianne Richmond, TrisGrier, CK (Christina Kerley), Dmitriy Kruglyak, Fard Johnmar, Carol Kirshner, Shahid N. Shah, Craig Lefebvre and I'm sure many more . . .

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