As an avid follower of health 2.0 and medicine 2.0 news, I was inundated last week with reports, tweets and blogs from the Medicine 2.0 conference in Toronto. Medicine 2.0 is an international gathering focused on web 2.0 technologies and their impact on health and medicine. It is organized and co-sponsored by several journals and organizations such as the Journal of Medical Internet Research and the Centre of Global eHealth Innovation and this year, the conference theme was dedicated to how social networking and web 2.0 changes health, healthcare and biomedical research. Interesting stuff in its own right but what struck me last week was the twitter feed and blog posts emerging from the conference, as bloggers such as Jen McCabe Gorman of Health Management Rx, Bertalan Mesko of Science Roll and multiple others loaded their presentations to Slideshare, posted photos to flickr, created podcasts from the conferences and conducted blog interviews while multiple others in the audience for the sessions (and we know what that feels like) gave blow by blow accounts of panels, papers and research discussions. It was fascinating. As someone said in their comments to one blog = it was just like being there. And for me, it was.

This week all those interested in scoliosis research have gathered in Salt Lake City for the annual conference of the Scoliosis Research Society. Syndicom was there and I am guessing some members of the SpineConnect community may have been present as well. As someone who suffers from mild scoliosis and who, fortunately, has been able to live with the condition without surgery, I was intrigued (and often overwhelmed!) by some of the abstracts I found on the conference website. The conference had the usual oral presentations, traditional poster presentations and then e-poster presentations. We don’t have e-poster presentations at the professional conferences I attend so I found this interesting. As I waited for the several MB programs to download I wondered how much easier it would be if all these abstracts and posters were on Slideshare - the website wouldn’t struggle, it wouldn’t take so long to download etc. But perhaps most importantly, the ideas and innovations conveyed in such presentations would be disseminated beyond those who a) attended the conference and/or b) had the time and patience to wait on the downloads!

I love attending medical and health conferences. The amount of innovation, imagination and sheer knowledge shared is just staggering and I always come away from them inspired by the work of those professionals dedicated to improving people’s health and daily lives. But I am also, perhaps like many patients, woefully underprepared for the language in which that innovation, imagination and knowledge is coded. That’s why I enjoyed the translations of those bloggers and tweeters from the Medicine 2.0 conference. These were healthcare professionals and writers alike, who disseminated those ideas to a wider web based audience in language they could understand, on their terms and in their time frame. I often attend conferences and come back with pages of notes for my colleagues who cannot attend. I think next time, I will try and blog and tweet as I go, as I invariably do not have the time on my return to catch up my colleagues as well as I would have liked. If any of our readers were present at the Scoliosis conference this week, I (and probably a vast audience of those living and working with scoliosis) would really appreciate hearing your summaries, views and comments from what you saw there. If you have photos, a presentation, even a funny conversation, please feel free to share them on your Facebook, Plaxo, Bebo, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, StumbleUpon, Friendfeed, and Slideshare pages/accounts. Let us know what you have done by commenting on this blog!

Happy posting!

With many thanks to Hammer51012!

Kirsten Broadfoot

Tags: conference, Flickr, information sharing, innovation, medicine 2.0, Scoliosis Research Society, Slideshare, spineconnect, syndicom

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 13th, 2008 at 8:26 am and is filed under Blog.