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Online Communities and Health Care
Last week I put up a show from the Zend PHP conference that featured Adam Bosworth talking about “content” and the fact that it’s still King. Adam is thought provoking and entertaining. This talk is no different.
Interestingly, Adam talks about content in the context of community (no big surprise there) and spends a great deal of time talking about the health care industry. Adam claims that there’s a growing need for tools that allow patients to add value to health-care related communities by sharing information and experiences. These tools could lead to better predictors of health conditions, earlier diagnosis, and more successful treatments. And we’d save a lot of money too. What’s not to like?
Posted by windley on October 9, 2006 6:22 PM
Comment from Laurel Papworth at October 10, 2006 8:37 PM
Hmm nothing new here really. One of the first really large, really successful (non geek) communities was DrKoop.com. Jenny Preece wrote about it in detail in her book Online Communities - Designing Useability, Supporting Sociability (2000) . Peer2Peer support by patients and relatives has been a fundamental driver in pharmaceutical companies underwriting large online health communities. I'm not negating the idea - it's great - but it's been happening for a few years now. Citizen Doctors if you need a buzzword. :P
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