My presentation at Spring 2006 Consumer Directed Health Care Conference and Expo, which was announced earlier has been delivered and was met with great enthusiasm.

The slides are attached, so you can download and see for yourself what caught the attention of consumer-directed healthcare leaders. Nearly everyone I talked to immediately got the transformative power that blogging and open media will have on behavior of healthcare consumers. We are in the nascent stages of the "Openness Big Bang".

To conference attendees visiting the blog for the first time: Click on the links in the "Featured Columns" section to meet our regular contributors, as I did not have time to mention everyone.

I would also like to take a moment and identify the leading medical bloggers, hosted elsewhere, as highlighted in the presentation:

Blog Thought Leaders

• Nick Genes, MD: Founder of Grand Rounds, the premier weekly medical blog “carnival”
  http://blogborygmi.blogspot.com/
• Fard Johnmar: Author of the first-ever analyst report on health and medical blogging
  http://fardj.prblogs.org/

Healthcare IT & Devices

• Shahid Shah: Coverage of Health IT architecture topics
  http://www.healthcareguy.com
• Jack Mason: Blogging IBM’s patient-centric healthcare vision
  http://healthnex.typepad.com/
• Michael Ostrovsky, MD: Reviews of medical “gadgets”
  http://www.medgadget.com/

Physicians in Private Practice

• Enoch Choi, MD: Practicing Urgent Care at Palo Alto Medical Foundation, covering a wide range of medical topics
  http://www.enochchoi.com/thoughts
• “Sydney Smith, MD”: Pseudonymous family physician commenting on the current medical news
  http://medpundit.blogspot.com/

Physicians in Academic Medicine

• Ves Dimov, MD: Coverage of clinical cases and technology by internists at The Cleveland Clinic Foundation
  http://casesblog.blogspot.com/
• Robert Centor, MD: General internist at University of Alabama comments on medical issues and the current state of medicine
  http://www.medrants.com/

Patients

• Amy Tenderich: A gold mine of straight talk and encouragement for people living with diabetes
  http://www.diabetesmine.com/
• Michael Weiss: A “professional patient” with Crohn’s Disease who endured over 100 hospitalizations
  http://www.hospitalpatient.org/

Healthcare Policy

• Matthew Holt: Focus on achieving universal coverage
  http://www.thehealthcareblog.com
• Trapier Michael: Focus on enabling market-based healthcare
  http://marketplace.md
• Joe Paduda: View from a seasoned insurance executive
  http://www.joepaduda.com/

The conference comes on the heels of several notable press mentions for TMBN this month. Dallas Morning News article has been covered by GruntDoc and San Mateo County Times mention has been highlighted on Medmusings and The Health Care Blog.

Final note for everyone. The "rhetorical" question closing CDHCC presentation will be answered soon. Stay tuned!