Healthcare and biomedical research are part of a global electronic ecosystem in which social media, mobile devices, and increasing public engagement have been playing game-changing roles. ‘Web 2.0’ has been used to describe a highly interactive virtual environment in which geographic, cultural, and language barriers are overcome by people's needs to form networks to communicate and collaborate due to common interests. Preventing or alleviating the burden of disease is a most powerful global common goal; hence it is no surprise that there are increasing reports describing informatics advances that enable ‘Health 2.0.’ For example, McCoy ( see page 713 ) describes how her team successfully used crowd sourcing (ie, outsourcing of a particular task to a large community of people) to construct a knowledge base of associations between medication and problems, in contrast to more traditional mechanisms based on a small panel of experts. The latter model is described by Phansalkar ( see page 735 ), who reports on the construction of a knowledge base …
['Lucila Ohno-Machado']
Informatics 2.0: implications of social media, mobile health, and patient-reported outcomes for healthcare and individual privacy