Remember that I started the defining in anticipation of talk I am giving? That talk is happening next week, in collaboration with the California Healthcare Foundation, who are working to foster next generation ideas for health care.

Based on the comments I’ve read to date, here’s what I put together:

Health 2.0 is participatory health care. The combination of content and community enables the patient to be an active partner in their own health care and the citizen to be an equal partner in improving the health system.

Here’s a summary of the improvements suggested:

Dave: add “When patients meet Web 2.0″
Andre: add “Social Media”
Jen: “Content and Community” (commerce coming)
Deborah: “Strike transition, promote participation”
Lodewijk: “Not a transition; Health 2.0 defines the combination of health data and health information with (patient) experience through the use of ICT, enabling the citizen to become an active and responsible partner in his own health and care pathway”
Gilles: ” Add ‘and equal’, add ‘informed’”
Dave: “Lodewijk + is the combination of new Web tools, health information, and patient awareness, enabling the citizen”
Susannah (offline) : “Participatory medicine”
Matthew: “Good luck”

Here’s the original:

Health 2.0 is the transition to personal, participatory health care. Everyone is invited to see what is happening in their own care and in the health care system in general, to add their ideas, and to make it better every day.

Better? Easy to discuss in an elevator, or on your way to a walking meeting?

• Milliman Medical Index - Average family of four at $15,609 medical costs / year. Employee share is up 10 %, the highest cost share is for pharmaceuticals, at 27 %. This ties to the Connectivity for Californians work, because it’s a reminder I need to look up total patient costs for hypertension management.

• Aggressive medical care, conservative vs aggressive - Nice XPlane (xplane.com - one of my favorite design groups) produced images of regional differences in health care costs, from Consumer Reports. It's helpful to see this group champion appropriate care for patients.

• DCist Preview: Dupont-Kalorama Museum Walk Weekend -

This photograph was taken on the National Mall, at an event celebrating the 60th Anniversary of the birth of the State of Israel. The women in the picture are tracing the roots of their family across the globe, along with other attendees.

I learned at the event that I am here because of Operation “Ezra & Nehemiah” - a massive, emergency airlift of 125,000 Jews from their homes in Iraq in 1950-1951, to the only country that would accept them. My parents were a part of that airlift, and eventually emigrated to the United States, where I was born.

My life experience as a social/cultural minority has, in a great way, connected me to people and ideas that I think I wouldn’t have appreciated otherwise. I am always drawn to stories about people, of all backgrounds, finding their home and belonging, whether it’s in their health care, or where they live and work.