Health 2.0: Meetup Locally, Act Globally

Washington DC Health 2.0, new Health 2.0 local chapter

The San Francisco based company, Health 2.0, (the one that runs the annual Health 2.0 conference) now has six local chapters: Hawaii; New York; Northwest; Boston; Washington D.C.; and Denver.  On Tuesday night, The Washington DC Health 2.0 chapter (which is also a Meetup group that formed in spring 2009) held its latest bimonthly meeting. Health 2.0 STAT - Rapid Fire Presentations from Health 2.0 Leaders gave each presenter five minutes. A panel discussion and Q&A followed, moderated by David Hale from the National Institutes of Health.

Though out of breath after sprinting through their 5 minutes, these two passionate Health 2.0 leaders, along with five others, shared their health/web 2.o and social media stories: 

• Mark Scrimshire, organizer of the popular HealthCampseries of events spoke about how, by using Health 2.0 and Web 2.0 tools, HealthCamp has grown from 6 people to a viral un-conference movement with 18 events with nearly 1,000 attendees world-wide in just over a year.
  

  Marc Scrimshire at Washington DC Health 2.0

• Chris Lindsley, editor at the award-winning University of Maryland Medical Center quickly showed how the medical center uses social media to achieve its goal of increasing patient volume. The Center’s 160 videos on its YouTube channel alone gets 1,000 views a day. 

David Hale had provocative questions for the panel, the last one touched on a concept called ‘cognitive surplus”. Commenting that in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching TV ads, he asked panelist what we should do with a free hour. Speaker Carol Torgan said to unplug, go outside, and experience all our senses, in four dimensions, which was greeted with a collective “hooray” and a couple “amens”.  Fellow speaker Ram Singh said to “study statistics…under a tree“. He got a less enthusiastic response–though I’m sure he’s a fun guy.