Health Foo

#healthfoo I am attending the Health Foo Camp in Cambridge, MA this weekend. Organized by O'Reilly Publications (Sara Winge and Tim O'Reilly) and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (Paul Tarini), this is a self-organizing conference (see the process at work above) at which people decide if and when they want to present sessions on whatever topics they choose. You attend whatever you want. You talk with anyone you want. You avoid people you know and try to meet new ones. Tim describes the goal as "creating new synapses in the global brain."

So the first guy I met was Brian Krejarek, who loves and makes wireless sensors of all kinds. Each one of those adhesive patches in the picture is a different kind of sensor that can monitor some behavior, environmental features, or whatever and deliver the data to a program where it will be processed and analyzed. His company is called Green Goose, where the tag line is Seriously Fun Sensors. Here's an article with more description, entitled "Green Goose Tracks Whether Your Kids are Doing Their Chores."

I wasn't surprised to meet my buddy e-Patient Dave deBronkart in the crowd. Dave has been on a whirlwind world tour talking about patient empowerment. The video from his TEDxMaastrich presentation, "Let Patients Help," has been spreading far and wise, with over 150,000 views. I have also written about a great presentation by Dave and Dr. Danny Sands at last year's IHI Annual Forum, also well worth your time. You see him here with organizer Sara Winge.

It was great to meet up with David Rosenman, on leave from transforming medicine at Mayo Clinic (and beyond!) to attend the Sloan Fellows Program in Innovation and Global Leadership at MIT, and Boston-local Jill Shah, Founder of Jill's List. Jill's List styles itself as "the ultimate directory of Comprehensive Medicine for patients, practitioners and organizations. Every day credentialed practitioners of complementary and alternative, integrative and conventional medicine join to connect with new patients."

After introductions, the group created the schedule for first set of sessions to begin today and run through Sunday morning. Examples are below.