“The Emergence of Web 2.0,
Health 2.0 and Medicine 2.0:
Are you ready for it?”
DON JUZWISHIN CHE PHD
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2009
VICTORIA, BRITISH COLUMBIA
Vancouver Island Chapter

Wikinomics
 Three rules of open spaces that have
emerged on the Internet
 (1) no body owns it,
 (2) everybody uses it and
 (3) anyone can improve it.
 The Internet is characterized with (1) openness, (2) peering,
(3) sharing, and (4) acting globally
 Tapscott and Williams

What are Web 2.0, Health 2.0 & Medicine 2.0?
 Web 2.0 is the changing trend of the World Wide
Web and web design
 Enhance creativity
 Communications
 Secure information sharing
 Collaboration
 Functionality
 Social networking, video sharing, wikis, blogs, folksonomies

What are Web 2.0, Health 2.0 & Medicine 2.0?
 “Health 2.0 is participatory healthcare characterized
by the ability to rapidly share, classify and
summarize individual health information with the
goals of improving health care systems, experiences
and outcomes via integration of patients and
stakeholders.”
• Ian Furst
• http://waittimes.blogspot.com/

What are Web 2.0, Health 2.0 & Medicine 2.0?
 “Medicine 2.0 applications, services and tools are Web-
based services for health care consumers, caregivers,
patients, health professionals, and biomedical
researchers, that use Web 2.0 technologies as well as
semantic web and virtual reality tools, to enable and
facilitate specifically social networking, participation,
apomediation, collaboration, and openness within and
between these user groups.”
 Eysenbach G
Medicine 2.0: Social Networking, Collaboration, Participation,
Apomediation, and Openness
J Med Internet Res 2008;10(3):e22
<URL: http://www.jmir.org/2008/3/e22/>

What are the issues?
 Hughes et al. argue there are four major tensions
represented in the literature on Health/Medicine
2.0:
 lack of clear definitions;
 issues around the loss of control over information traditionally
the purview of health care providers;
 safety and the dangers of inaccurate information; and
 issues of ownership and privacy
• Hughes B, Joshi I, Wareham J
Health 2.0 and Medicine 2.0: Tensions and Controversies in the Field
J Med Internet Res 2008;10(3):e23
<URL: http://www.jmir.org/2008/3/e23/>

What will it do for the citizen, consumer, patient?
 Provide 24/7 access to high quality evidence on the
effectiveness of health care interventions
 Provide the opportunity for social networking, support
groups, sharing of experiences
 24/7 monitoring of health status parameters – smart house
 Instantaneous feedback on medication effects
 Encourage health literacy being a priority in education
 The citizen, consumer, patient own their personal health
record
 Reduce adverse events
 Access to remote locations
 Support of chronic disease management and health
promotion

What will it do for the health care provider?
 Provide 24/7 access to high quality evidence on
effectiveness of health care interventions
 Provide immediate news of breakthrough findings or
cautions
 Identify and share international best practices
 Provide opportunity for immediate and trended
outcomes associated with interventions
 Offer opportunities for collaboration and partnership
 Provide decision support tools
 New forms of education and continuing education

What will it provide the researchers?
 A storehouse of linked data
 Provide a bridge to anonymous data and information
on the citizen, customer, patient community
 Facilitate clinical and field trials matching client
criteria and research design requirements
 Bring them into the collaboratory
 Need to make explicit peer review processes

What will it do for the policy makers?
 Make explicit accountability relationships, roles and
responsibilities
 Provide transparency on the monitoring and
performance of the health care system
 Provide access to linked data bases
 Drive and link health policy informatics from the sub
cellular to the individual and population health
levels

Can the issues be addressed?
 Privacy and security
 Banks and airlines have done it
 Ownership of knowledge
 Provide accreditation or certification for sites that
have credible and reputable materials
 apomediation
 Support research into health informatics

Why embrace it?
Catalyst for advancing the integration and coordination of
services and information
Provides synergy for advancing the requirements of health
reform and renewal
Stimulates the objectives of Canada Health Infoway
Gives the ownership of the personal health record to the
citizen, consumer, patient
Balances the information asymmetry between health care
providers and citizens, consumers, patients
Provides access to high quality information on
international best practices 24/7

Questions