How interconnected are we?

At Doctors 2.0 & You, the "& You" referred  to the fact that the health care system is (or should be) a very, if not fully, interconnected world. However, this is still a work in progress. To connect  people within their own country, as most health care is still local, is already a challenge and to go beyond national borders presents an even greater challenge given language and travel requirements. Personal and collective resources both play a rôle. The advent of healthcare social media will help accelerate the connection, where basic resources are available. But much more needs to and will be done!

However, the international language, despite  the improvement of automatic translation tools, tends to be English (or globish ;-) and, given as well, the early start that the US had both on the internet  and in the demonstration of the need for eHealth, many of the most-known protagonists, whether patients, physicians, start-ups have tended to be based in the US while much is happening around the world. We can salute to this end, the hashtags developed by @andrewspong and @whydotpharma in the  #hcsm... series.

Nonetheless, Sermo is still often cited as "the" physician community, because of its rôle in the US, whereas Doctors.Net in the UK has more physicians both in the absolute and as a percentage of UK doctors. Doctissimo in France has a higher proportion of internet users in France, than any health site to my knowledge around Europe or North America. Various countries, organizations and individuals are doing amazing things. The list would be too long to place here.  But we have previously posted on this blog articles in English about both Gilles Frydman of Acor, a Frenchman in the US and Dave de Bronkart  an American in...the US and author of the remarkable Laugh, Sing, and Eat Like a Pig. I highly recommend a re-read of thoseposts.(And for the Francophones, there are other articles on the French version of Silber's Blog --use the search box-- and the Santé 2.0 Blog.)

At Doctors 2.0 & You conference in Paris, one of our key goals is to highlight the best in healthcare and social media and web 2.0 tools with an international perspective. While we could not of course cover all continents, speakers represented many countries and participants even more, a total of 22. And  amongst the patient advocates present were (by alphabetical order) Kathi Apostolidis (see her bilingual blog), Catherine Cerisey, Gilles Frydman, Jan Geissler who prepared a video for Doctors 2.0, (See also this link to an interview of Jan by Silja Chouquet).

Our next blog post presents Catherine Cerisey, a first in English. 

Comments

[Brian_Barker]

Globish reminds me of another failed project called "Basic English" which failed, because native English speakers could not remember which words not to use :)

So it's time to move forward and adopt a neutral non-national language, taught universally in schools worldwide,in all nations. As a native English speaker, I would prefer Esperanto.

Your readers may be interested in the following video at http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=_YHALnLV9XU Professor Piron was a translator with the United Nations in Geneva.

No future for Esperanto? Rubbish!

The study course http://www.lernu.net is now receiving 125,000 hits per month and Esperanto Wikipedia gets 400 000 hits per day. That can't be bad :)