Medicine 2.0

You may have heard the term "Medicine 2.0", what is it?

Well, first, it is an annual conference, the first incarnation of which recently took place in Toronto.  I wasn't able to go but really wanted to, and definitely plan to go next year.  (Keith Kaplan posted an interesting recap of his attendance.)  According to the conference organizers, here's another answer:

Medicine 2.0 applications, services and tools are Web-based services for health care consumers, caregivers, patients, health professionals, and biomedical researchers, that use Web 2.0 technologies as well as semantic web and virtual reality tools, to enable and facilitate specifically social networking, participation, apomediation, collaboration, and openness within and between these user groups.

The "Web 2.0" in the definition lends its suffix to the term Medicine 2.0, and while not exact describes a general set of technologies that allow people to interact online, forming relationships and exchanging information.  Increasingly that information can include pathology data and images, and that's where Aperio and digital pathology come in...  essentially we make tools that enable Medicine 2.0.

Stay tuned, I'm sure you'll hear a lot more about this in the future :)