There was an interesting post by Steve Brown on the Brown 2020 Blog titled, “Health 2.0 Makes Information Therapy Possible.”

The argument basically goes like this:  If information therapy (Ix) is about delivering the right information to the right person at the right time, the complexity involved to make the information prescriptions personalized enough to be effective for each individual requires the production and prescription of Ix by “co-creators, selectors, navigators, recommenders, and reviewers of content.”

There’s some merit to Brown’s argument. I have always argued that of the three Ix elements, tailoring the information to individual needs (”the right person”) is the greatest challenge — not that finding the “right information” or targeting to the right moment in care (”the right time”) are easy. After all, there are so many characteristics — from demographic to psychosocial (and everything in between) — that affect whether the information will actually help a consumer make the best decision or effect a positive behavior change.

That said, there are many other scientific tools in the Ix toolbox besides what most people would consider Health 2.0. There is a great deal of decision science, behavior change science, and predictive modeling science that help us to deliver timely, tailored information to consumers. Health 2.0 tools add to our arsenal valuable additional mechanisms for delivering the most relevant, understandable and useful information to consumers, but that’s a long way from saying Ix is impossible without Health 2.0.

What is not in doubt is that this is exactly the kind of conversation that we’ll be having in Boston April 22-23 at the first-ever “Health 2.0 Meets Information Therapy” Conference that I’m hosting with Matthew Holt & Indu Subaiya. In fact, the first of our “Great Debates on the Next Generation of U.S. Health Care” is on “Ix and Health 2.0: Synergies or Tensions?”

From my perspective, the tensions are just a product of change. But the synergies of these two movements really offer a gateway to a redesigned, effective, efficient and patient-centered health care delivery system.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 4th, 2009 at 6:32 am and is filed under Health 2.0 Space. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.