EU conference on e-health

Next week the EU is holding a conference on ehealth. You can follow all the proceedings via webcast, as well as interact via your preferred social media.
Digital channels including Twitter, Facebook, SMS, and blogs have been set up so everyone who wants to follow the conference live can read the posts and tweets of the digital reporters. Anyone can participate by asking direct questions to the chairs by email, SMS, Facebook or Twitter:
a. Blog: http://ehealthweek2010.wordpress.com
b. Twitter: http://twitter.com/ehealthweek2010
c. Facebook:http://www.facebook.com/pages/eHealth-week-2010/333750333794?ref=nf
d. Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/eHealthweek2010

I am giving a keynote at the conference, “Harnessing patient experience for better healthcare”. As I prepared the talk and the travel I found it far easier to find information and comparative information about hotels in Barcelona, than it is to compare hospitals ten miles from home. I ended up re-writing my talk to make this fact the central question of the discussion and to point out that as a society we have the chance to change this before our children ask us how we allowed such a ridiculous situation to persist. To be honest, there is no reasonable answer to the question that excuses the omission of not giving citizens real-time, comparative information about the health care they pay for. Such transparency will have profound implications and the power to transform the quality, cost and safety of services delivered to patients.