This week I attended AlwaysOn's annual Innovation Summit @Stanford and had chance to catch up with the leading trends and people of the Silicon Valley technology and venture world.

As you can see from the Summit program, most of the major tech trends were represented. Of course, healthcare is wa-a-ay too far away from "Silicon Valley mainstream" to have significant presence, yet the program on blogging and social media was excellent.

So let me offer an executive summary of what this means to healthcare consumers, professionals and managers.

The real eye-opener was on the "How Far Will Consumer-Generated Media Go?" panel. Ironically, the panelists demonstrated the full spectrum of attitudes towards CGM by the alphabetical order of their last names and the seating arrangement:

• Michael Robertson (CEO, MP3Tunes)
  Michael's fame comes from MP3.com of yesteryear. They bought the CDs, digitized them and put online for free - damn those pesky copyrights. Recording industry sued them out of existence and they are gone, just like Napster.
  
• Chad Hurley (CEO, YouTube)
  YouTube is technically legal. You see, if a consumer uploads a copyrighted video, under DMCA it is not website's fault and all they need to do is take it down if asked. So YouTube is full of copyrighted video, no one has time to police. Media industry has resigned to treating YouTube as a force of nature.
  
• David Goldberg (Head of Yahoo! Music)
  Yahoo has plenty to lose by doing anything to alienate the Media Establishment, even if technically legal. But what they are doing is licensing content and giving it to their users in a controlled sandbox to play with and remix. Works for them so far, but they are not taking the world by storm.
  
• Michael Arrieta (SVP, Sony)
  Deer in the headlights. Deeply uncomfortable with CGM and trying to resist it to no avail. In their view, consumer is supposed to read / watch what they are given and leave production to "professionals". However, even they are using blogosphere to get the message out.

NOW: Replace the term "Consumer Generated Media (CGM)" with "Consumer Driven Healthcare (CDHC)". Where do you fit?

Steve Rubel, who is keynoting our Healthcare Blogging Summit 2006, was on the Blogging and Social Networking panel and offered a great way to conceptualize what is going on:

This is about Continuum between Control and Transparency

Think about it. Both total Control and total Transparency are rarely found in the real world. Everyone is somewhere on the continuum and may have reasons to be where they are. Consumers will keep pushing for more transparency and vote with their wallets. Institutions will fight to preserve control, but can only keep it to a certain point.

Till a competitor without baggage of status quo comes along.

I think that in healthcare, transparency and participation are unlikely to go as far as in entertainment. Regulations are more complex and the stakes are much higher. If things go wrong, lives are at stake. But there is no excuse for cutting consumer out of the loop either.

In the end consumers will always get their way. As Technorati's Peter Hirshberg, who moderated the panel says "Control is so 20th century". Want a graphic illustration? Watch this YouTube video:

My favorite quote (at the end of the video):

High, inside the glass towers, our greatest minds have prepared to respond:

Well, can't we just start blogging back at them? Well yeah... But where is the money in that?

LOL! Do not just "blog at them". Engage in a genuine and authentic conversation. That is the only way to go.

Adapt or die.