I am in Oakland, California, today, participating in an discussion sponsored by Kaiser Permanente about Web 2.0 applications in health care. As part of the discussion I presented my story as a physician who wrote a blog internally for our medical group, and since October, 2007, on the public Internet (here).

From 2005-2007 I managed an internal blog that ended up having 748 posts total, so for 2 years, I posted something almost every business day, along with other physician informaticists on my team with me. That’s quite a commitment. This blog has 298 posts on it since October, 2007. I actually never thought I’d keep a blog, but I’m (a) glad I’m doing it and (b) glad I have a story to share about it as a Health Information Technology leader. I want people to know how I am serving them.

I also got to moderate/interact with two industry experts in the field, Tim Collins, SVP of Experiential Marketing for Wells Fargo Bank, and Lee Aase, Manager for Syndication and Social Media for the Mayo Clinic. It’s an honor to meet other industry leaders who are embracing this technology, and they are embracing it. I know this is the future (or the present…)

Given my experience, the idea of patients bringing their user generated content into the physician patient relationship really interests me. Could an electronic health record of the future subscribe to specially tagged RSS feeds from our patients? I don’t think physicians can or would be following 2,000 lives worth of lifestreams. However, if there’s something in a patient’s life that they want us to know about and can get it to us without double entry, I think that information would change the content of our relationship a lot. And in a good way.