On Wednesday the California Health Care Foundation (CHCF, a nonprofit that funds original health policy research) published a report on the increasing importance of social media to patients and healthcare consumers: The Wisdom of Patients.
According to this report, people seeking health information have been early adopters in the transition from the read-only Web to 2.0 — but health professionals have been relatively reluctant to follow them. The report also explores how some high-traffic health blogs and wikis work, and projects what might happen when healthcare organizations join the conversation.
There’s just one problem: CHCF’s own site isn’t 2.0. It offers no functionality for readers of this report about online conversation to join a conversation about the report with the report’s authors.
But give CHCF credit: They’re aware of the irony. Spencer A. Sherman, CHCF’s director of publishing and communications, told me in a e-mail: “We are in the process of adding the ability for readers to respond to commentaries posted on our two news services: California HealthLine and iHealthBeat. That should launch in several months. We will be looking at the response from our readers and, based on their interest, potentially include the ability to add reader comments to our other sites.”
Meanwhile, report author Jane Sarasohn-Kahn (a health economist and technology consultant) is starting a conversation about these issues on her own blog, Health Populi.
