First day of Medicine 2.0 today.  In general, the conference hasn’t focused on my global health and tech interests but is looking at practical solutions for Western health issues.  It was probably naive of me, but I didn’t expect such an academic focus: the presenters keep reminding us that they’re not tech people, but rather sociologists, anthropologists and epidemiologists.  In my head, technology is this explosive, creative, exciting thing that constantly surprises and challenges me.  The approaches highlighted here are pragmatic rather than mindblowing.  So I’m missing the global health elements, but learning a lot about practical approaches to public health and physician support online.

I always need a few days to process, but for now here are some links:

Jason Bonander from the Center for Disease Control presented on his research into how people are presenting their health behaviours and risks online by collecting data from 100 open Myspace profiles (eg, people who identified their body type or who could be seen smoking in their profile pictures).  His view seems to be that people are already sharing health data online — lets build widgits to channel this info into prevention.  He also mentioned a project called RiskBot that seems very interesting but I can’t find any more online…

Canadian Medical Association’s online initiatives MyDoctor.ca and the just-launched Asklepios offer services for Canadian physicians including professional networking and web development.  The patient platforms are geared towards chronic disease monitoring and electronic health records.

OntarioMD offers similar (but seemingly more polished and responsive) sites for Ontario doctors.  They have broken things down into three work modes and three corresponding sites: clinical, practice management and collaboration, acknowledging that physicians are spending significant amounts of time outside of clinical activities.

Bloggers Jen McCabe Gorman and Berty Mesko presented as well, though I only caught the end of the presentation.

More tomorrow!