Health 2.0

Health 2.0 (German roughly “Health 2.0”) and the closely related term Medicine 2.0 are collective terms for the possibilities that result from the connection between health care, e-health and Web 2.0 . The term became widely used after a number of newspaper articles in business and public publications (e.g. the Economist 2007) and it appeared in medical circles (e.g. first in the British Medical Journal 2006).

A fairly accurate definition of Health 2.0 is “participatory health care”. This describes the possibility created by Web 2.0 to be able to integrate patients and other reference groups in the rapid dissemination, evaluation and summary of health information. The common goal is an improvement in health care in general, as well as a possible improvement in patient care (patient experiences) and ultimately also the treatment results (medical outcomes).

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• D. Giustini: How Web 2.0 is changing medicine: Editorial. In: British Medical Journal. 2006, 333: 1283-1284 online
• Health 2.0: Technology and society: Is the outbreak of cancer videos, bulimia blogs and other forms of “user generated” medical information a healthy trend? In: The Economist. September 6, 2007: 73-74