Day one of the WHIT 3.0 conference started with a hot and hip review of the first 5,000 days of the internet by Kevin Kelly (Co-founder & Senior Maverick, Wired Magazine) followed by a series of impressive speakers who kept the temperature high until the reception finally cooled us down later that evening. Kelly expounded on the sheer magnitude of the web and his description of the web, which I’ve seen him present before, being just a series of screens to one, huge global machine that is online all the time. He worked the theme that if it’s not on the web or readable by it, it doesn’t exist. That innovation becomes more powerful when you add community and how products are now being transformed, through the web, into services - Kindle is not a digital reading device, but a reading service. For health care, this means taking the electronic medical record and seeing it not as a stagnant file, but a vital component of the medical conversation between doctor and patient, for example.

John E. Abele (Founder and Chairman, Boston Scientific Corporation) in a discussion with Kevin Kelly, made a few points worth noting. With regard to the federal HIPAA law which governs the privacy of medical information for health care organizations in the U.S., John observed that while addressing an important concern, HIPAA has set us back. He asks, “Has it provided more protection for the privacy of our health care information?” Maybe for a small number, but, he says, “we’ve thrown the baby out with the bath water” when it comes to health IT innovation. The law prevents, presumably, more robust sharing of medical information that can lead to better outcomes and more effective health care. On another front, in response to a question about what China has to teach us in health care, John opined that the Chinese Ministry of Health believes that they have a blank slate when it comes to health care reform, and that they have a mission to create a practical health care system. This is something, he says that we in the U.S. may want to watch carefully and learn from their efforts.

David J. Brailer (Former and First National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, and Founder, Health Evolution Partners) polled the audience about where they thought their health data would reside in the future. With health plans? Government? Providers? Information technology companies? The results were typical he says, about even numbers across all four responses making our ability to work through this issue all the more difficult.

Jeffrey Gruen (Chief Medical Officer, Revolution Health) took us through his “Revolutionary Health Care Manifesto” that promised to democratize access to medical information and empower consumers. He realizes that the world is indeed getting flatter — health care included - but, more important, it is spinning faster. He acknowledges that health care folks are over whelmed by the rapidity of change. But we are not the only ones suffering from future shock, so are entire institutions, as they try to understand where it’s all going, and where they stand in it. Health 2.0 to Gruen is all about the bringing together of content, context and community: valuable health information, with “what’s it mean to me” and the ditching of the lecture for a conversation with others.

One other hot spot for the day was the energizing presentation given by Vijay Govindarajan (Professor of International Business’ Tuck School of Business) and author of the book 10 Rules for Strategic Innovators. His provocative comments on goal setting for the true strategic futurist — “set unrealistic goals!” — along with his exhortations for bottom-up thinking, looking beyond the present challenges to what health care could be, and getting on with it — a call for action — couldn’t have been better timed.

More tomorrow.