Every month our Health 2.0 NYC Chapter meetup gathers 40-50 people at PRNewswire offices and every month the dedication of our members truly amazes me. The thorough questioning of presenters, the contribution to the conversations, the caliber of the brainpower in this one room.... There have been a number of conversations around expanding the meetup size, to find a larger room and expand the reach of our Chapter. Personally, I love it the way it is – it gives us a chance to have focused conversation about the topic we love – how to help healthcare consumers!! We need your feedback on this, so please do not hesitate to contact myself or Lynn to voice your opinion.

First few quick announcements:

1.Unfortunately, I had to postpone HealthCampNYC due to a few venues falling through last minute. Please stay tuned but this will most likely happen in November once the venue is locked in.


2. We were fortunate enough to hear about another even taking place in NYC - Gel Health - in October and it is being organized by Mark Hurst. GEL is short for "Good Experience Live", Gel is a conference, and community, exploring good experience in all its forms -- in business, technology, art, society, and life. And now Mark brings the discussion of good experience to healthcare. For more information and to see the amazing lineup, please checkout - http://gelconference.com/health/


Now, a quick recap of our presenters:

First up was the dynamic duo form DrChrono - Michael and Daniel. These guys have been on NPR, Fox Business and many more and we were honored to hear them present their platform that connects doctors to patients. This is not a typical Health 2.0 company and while their products are focused on the back office it helps doctors practice what they love most – medicine. It is a Software-as-a-Service model that helps alleviate pains that physicians experience with scheduling, billing and practice analytics. Their scheduling software looks simple to use but features many neat features that I, as a patient would love – notification and reminders about my appointments via my preferred channels (i.e SMS, phone or email). Secondly, they offer full billing solution that expedites payments, provides reporting and saves the practice time. All that for hard-to-beat monthly price points. For more information take a look at DrChrono.com. Good luck with your efforts guys!


Next presenter, John Phelan from Zweena presented his Zweena Health Record platform. While it does not have all the bells and whistles that I would want in managing my PHR (yet) it solves a real issue that I have been talking about for a while now – getting your data out of the back rooms of the physician offices. It is my data and I want it. It took me over 3 months to get my records from my PCP and I quickly signed up for John’s offering to repeat the same in hopefully much less of a time. The sign-up process was simple and easy and the only outstanding component is the “Authorization to Release Medical Records” that I have to fax back to their office. The rest is handled by his team. For $20 I get my records from upto 4 doctors for 6 months. Keep an eye out for Zweena.

Lynn Nezin held an optional session at the end – “What do you look for in your doctor?” - and to my surprise about 80% of the room stuck around to participate. We will be posting the write up in a few days to update this group.

Once again – thank you all for participating and thanks to PRNewswire to continue hosting our meetups

See you all in October