Last Tuesday I attended HealthCamp Boston, a really excellent 1-day “unconference” organized by the extremely energetic Mark Scrimshire.  The unconference format is really fantastic, provided that you get the right people in the room at the right time. In this case, we did, and the user-generated agenda included an excellent discussion on the new HHS rules for PHRs lead by David Harlow of HealthBlawg, a deep dive into design by Claudio Luis Vera, a session on consumer and clinician PHR engagement that John Moore and I put together (with John providing most of the good bits) and a discussion of Twitter’s role in social healthcare media led by Jen McCabe Gorman. It was great to finally meet some people I only knew from online, and I definitely made some new friends (including beers and a fascinating discussion after the meeting with Vivek Garg of TrialX). I definitely recommend these events, and at $25 a person it’s a lot cheaper than normal conference. We’ll be organizing one on software design in healthcare at HMS in the very near future.

I didn’t actually make it to Jen’s presentation on Twitter – I was over with the pharma crowd. But last Tuesday was the day I figured out what Twitter was good for. It’s not that I was a Twitterphobe, but I’d signed up because all the cool kids seemed to be doing it. I followed a bunch of people, and set up this blog to advertise posts as tweets, and that was about it.

The eureka moment came during the first session of the day.  Since attendees were encouraged to tweet about the event, I brought up Twitter on my laptop and started writing tweets that summarized the interesting points of the discussion, using the #hcbos hash tag to identify them to the other conference-goers and interested outsiders.  Then I started following the hash tag in another window, and saw a few other people in the room were also tweeting. And here’s the cool bit – we were generally picking up on the same stuff. Not completely, but with at least 80% overlap. And just like that, Twitter was validated as an information source. I just had to see it in action.

For the rest of the conference I watched the hash tag and picked up some of the key sentiments from the sessions I missed. The next two days I followed the tags for the Health 2.0 conference, which I hadn’t attended. While I certainly missed the details, I definitely picked up the flavor of the event.  And in the week since, it’s been a great way to maintain contact with all the new people I met at #hcbos.

So that’s that – I’m not yet a complete Twitter addict, but I think I get it. Of course, now that I’m here, I’m seeing the dark side as well, as it becomes another vector for spreading swine-flu hysteria. As is often the case , xkcd gets to the heart of it.