More than 1,500 people gathered at the 2011 Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco at the end of September to see the latest innovations in health technology. Several major product launches, ground breaking announcements and more than 100 live technology demos were featured. 

David Milner, President and Cindy Carson, Business Development Manager at Milner-Fenwick were on hand with colleagues from project-partner Preventice to present its latest product, HealthClips Rx and to attend many of the sessions.

In 5 short years, the Health 2.0 Conference has become the leading showcase of cutting-edge technologies that can improve healthcare delivery. Health 2.0 was founded by Indu Subaiya and Matthew Holt in 2007 and is now a community of hundreds of organizations and thousands of innovators.

Some of the themes that arose from the conference included new sensors and devices for everything health related, expansion of patient communities and how we interact within them, the next generation of clinician workflow tools, and innovative ways to mine, organize and analyze data within provider systems and on the internet.

Many of the products and services featured focused on improving patient education and communication including:

• Technology from CareCoach that allows patients to plan, record, and review doctor visits via smartphones.
• A personal health management system from Numera/Social that runs on Facebook.
• A website, Medify, that allows patients to look up research studies on specific diseases and treatments.
• A start-up, Medico, that aims to bring consumer health information to Spanish-speaking populations.
• A new website, Clarimed, that aims to be the healthcare equivalent of a Kelley Blue Book. The site features a database of more than 125,000 medical devices, diseases, and medical procedures culled from FDA and other government databases.
• A free online diet and healthy living community, SparkPeople, with over 3 million members, 15 million monthly visits, thousands of success stories.
• A company, Zarpz, that helps patients with terminal diseases create content they wish to share with their loved ones years after the patient passes away.
• A web-based patient relationship management system, Healthy Circles, that lets providers customize the way they interact with patients.

Speakers included Mark Smith, President of the California Health Care Foundation (keynote); Richard Gilfillan, Acting Director, Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI); Peter Levin, Chief Technology Office, Department of Veterans Affairs; Abdul Sheikh, Program Director at the National Cancer Institute, Mark Bertolini, Chairman, CEO & President; Aetna Thomas Goetz, Deputy Editor, Wired Magazine and Author; Louis Burns, CEO, Intel-GE CareInnovations; and George Halvorson, CEO, Kaiser Permanente.

For more information about Health 2.0 and upcoming conference, please see www.health2con.com.