In July 2006, Envision Solutions and The Medical Blog Network launched the first global survey of healthcare bloggers. They launched the survey because the healthcare blogosphere is rapidly growing in size and importance.

The results of the survey are now available and you can view the full report at http://www.envisionsolutionsnow.com/survey.html.

Here are the findings of the survey that I thought were interesting:

• 3.3% of the respondents classified their blog as an advocacy org/nonprofit
• When asked about the most important reason they started blogging, 19.2% of the respondents stated that they blog to educate others and 8.5% of the respondents blog to advocate for a cause
• When asked about the second most important reason they started blogging, 24.9% of the respondents (the majority of the respondents) said they blog to educate others and 11.9% blog to advocate for a cause
• 55.7% blog about health news, 60.9% blog about personal experiences, and
  47.1% blog about disease information

Since not many of the bloggers that participated in this survey blog for a nonprofit, I started thinking about the blogs I have come across that are for health related organizations and the content health organizations could blog about.

Hi -- I'm an active member of an online breast cancer patient community, BCmets.org.  It's a free list.serv, founded and maintained by a man whose wife died of the disease about five years ago.  I've become very interested in how social networking and other Web 2.0 capabilities could be applied to such communities.  This would not only enhance the "user experience," but I'm a firm believe that the "collective wisdom" of such groups constitutes a body of knowledge that is being under-utilized in health care. 

I've been working on ways to apply some of this thinking to the community I'm a part of (the list.serv owner is very supportive), and would love to get in touch with others who are thinking/doing similar things.  I've also hooked up with a U of Wisconsin academic who studies this area, and we are submitting an abstract to present at an eHealth conference in DC in September. 

I'm an individual contributor to Google Health Co-op and work on the non-profit Palo Alto Medical Foundation's tagging efforts @ Google Health Co-op as well.  I'd be happy to speak regarding how tagging is improving health search on Google.

http://www.enochchoi.com/thoughts/archives/002164.html

http://www.google.com/coop/profile?user=000834671960008790965

http://www.google.com/coop/profile?user=001677525886229228418