Our Speakers

Segolène Ayme, Director, Orphanet

Ségolène is a medical geneticist, epidemiologist, and director of research at INSERM (National Institute of health and Medical research) in Paris. Her research concerns the Public health impact of technology on human genetics. Ségolène is a member of both the National Rare Disease Plan steering committee and the Rare Disease Task Force at the European Commission. Beyond all that, Ségolène is a true internet pioneer having founded OrphaNet, the rare disease portal which even the Who relies upon for disease classification. OrphaNet offers search, content, clinical trial recruiting services and consultation information; all in multiple languages.

Frankie Dolan, Managing Director, MedWorm

Frankie started MedWorm, which integrates a medical search engine, multiple RSS newsfeeds, and more to keep doctors and patients up to date on medical information, because she was jealous or guilty (take your pick!) about her physician husband’s role in helping the sick. Her training as a computer engineer might obscure the fact that Frankie’s an environmental activist who almost stood for Parliament for the Green Party, has a degree in fashion, and is probably the only English person here who can speak fluent French!

Célia Boyer, Executive Director, Health On the Net Foundation

Health on the Net Foundation (hoN) has been offering practical guidance to medical information on the Internet since 1996 when it started certifying sites and Celia has been there since the start. Although Celia’s degrees are in physics and computer engineering, she’s become perhaps the international specialist in on-line health information quality. While the ubiquitous HON ratings are recognized by both the French High Health Authority and the United Nations, today Celia’s going to introduce the Health 2.0 version of HON.

West Shell, Chairman and CEO, Healthline Networks

West is a kayaker, skier and fly fisherman, who somehow also finds time to run Healthline. Healthline is like three companies in one—a health destination search engine and content site, an advertising network, and an enterprise software company supplying health, technology and media customers like Aetna, Ask.com, and US News & World Report. Its multiple approaches to helping consumers access relevant health information (including symptoms, treatments, drugs and much more) are based on its complex underlying ontology.

Steven Krein, CEO, OrganizedWisdom

Organized Wisdom is an expert-guided community search service, which provides Wisdom Cards on multiple health topics, organizations, doctors and much more. Each Wisdom Card is a series of vetted and selected links to health-related content. Steve always seems to have a new product launch at Health 2.0 Conferences in the US, so we’re excited to see what surprise he’s going to spring on us today!

Berci Mesko, CEO, Webicina

Berci Mesko is one of the more remarkable young physicians anywhere. We’ve been watching his progress since as a medical student he started blogging about Health 2.0 on Scienceroll back in 2006. Early last year he graduated from the University of Debrecen, Medical School and Health Science Center and is moving straight onto a PhD in clinical genomics and personalized medicine. But we’re most impressed by his creation of Webicina.com, a Web 2.0 guidance service for patients and medical professionals which seems to multiply on a daily basis! Berci was also featured in the video Indu Subaiya made about Future Physicians, and graciously accepted to be our conference’s Ambassador to Hungary, but this is his first time speaking at Health 2.0.

Roberto Ascione, PagineMediche.it & President, Publicis Healthware International

Roberto is a physician who leads Publicis Healthware, an international digital healthcare agency with a range of services and products including EMRs, hospital web sites and more. But he’s here today to show us PagineMediche.it which he founded in 2001, and now has more than 90% of Italian physicians represented and 650,000 visits a month. Today, he’ll be showing us how the site allows patients to communicate directly with physicians. Roberto has also done a wonderful job as our conference’s regional Ambassador to Italia, and thanks to him, some leading Italian journalists may well be sitting next to you.

Gilles Frydman, Founder, ACOR

In 1995, when Gilles’ wife, Monica, discovered that she had breast cancer, Gilles created ACOR, the Association of Cancer online resources, and the world of Internet resources for cancer patients has never quite been the same since. ACOR’s 159 listservs deliver over 1.5 million email messages per week. And now Gilles is a mainstay behind the new Society for Participatory Medicine. Gilles tried to launch ACOR in Europe earlier last decade, and even got to practice his French, at Denise’s invitation. Now he thinks that it’s time for this “kosherfrog” to bring ACOR back to Europe.

Jamie Heywood, Chairman, PatientsLikeMe

Jamie founded PatientslikeMe with brother Ben and friend Jeff Cole when brother Stephen was suffering from ALS. The family’s remarkable story was captured in the documentary So Much So Fast. PatientslikeMe has since expanded from ALS to many other conditions, and now has over 45,000 patients sharing information in a radically open way. Many of these patients are involved in ongoing studies such as their new community research venture into Epilepsy with UCB.

Neil Bacon, Managing Director, iWantGreatCare

Neil revolutionized the UK medical community in 1998 when he founded Doctors.net.uk. Now he’s launched iWantGreatCare.org which allows ratings and reviews of doctors, dentists, hospitals, medicines and care homes. Whilst this has made some of his fellow doctors a touch grumpy (well in some cases more than a touch), Neil’s finding that several practices are very interested in discovering much more about the views of their patients and today he’ll show what that service and business looks like.

Christian Angele, CEO, imedo

After working in corporate marketing in both well known German multi-nationals and in his own start up working in China, Christian founded imedo in 2007 and quickly raised more than $5m venture capital to help build out the site. imedo has over 80,000 registered users and over 1,500 communities with over 1.2 million visits a month. Christian’s plan is to use Web 2.0 tools to revolutionize health online in Germany and today he’ll demonstrate how it’s working!

Alexander Schachinger, Humboldt University, Berlin

Alexander Schachinger is a self-confessed Health 2.0 addict. Following a career in digital media consulting in germany and Canada, Alex is now both completing a Ph.D and doing consulting. Today he’s going to share his research results from what we believe is the first qualitative e-patient online survey and health web site analyses on a national scale ever done in Europe.

Susannah Fox, Associate Director, Digital Strategy, Pew Internet Project

Susannah is the authority on what Americans are doing online regarding their health, and is a regular presenter at Health 2.0 conferences. Some of her recent reports include: Twitter and Status Updating, Fall 2009 and The Social Life of Health Information, but most of the time you’ll find her provocative analysis on the e-patients.net blog and on twitter.

Daniel Palestrant, CEO, Sermo

After Daniel’s career as a surgeon was derailed by a bad back, he founded Sermo, which now has over 100,000 registered physicians in its online community. In the past year Daniel’s been spending lots of time on TV on behalf of his increasingly politically grumpy community, debating the likes of leading Democrat Howard Dean, and coming to virtual blows with the American Medical Association. But at Sermo’s core are thousands of physicians discussing (and voting on) hundreds of clinical cases.

Miguel Cabrer, CEO and Founder, Medting

Since getting a Computer Science degree from the Balearic Islands University, Miguel has been working on projects connected to telemedicine and eHealth in the US and in Spain, including a five year stint as CIO of Hospital Son Llatzer which has received numerous awards for its Digital hospital project. He founded Medting.com to provide an international venue for sharing radiology images & videos which enables clinical case collaboration for Second opinions, Medical Education, and the Scientific Social Network. Medting has enterprise licenses with hospitals in Spain and elsewhere including Mayo Clinic and King Fahd in Saudi Arabia. Medting has 6,000 registered physicians sharing over 2,700 clinical cases.

Tim Ringrose, Managing Director, Medical Communities, Doctors.net.uk

Doctors.net.uk was started in 1998 and has now become the dominant player in the UK online physician market with more than 1/3 of UK physicians using the community every week to discuss clinical cases, administration, politics and much more. After working as a hospital physician in Nephology and Intensive Care, Tim has been with Doctors.net.uk since 2000, and says that their business model of allowing pharma and med device companies to research physician opinion respects the trust of their members.

David Payne, British Medical Journal, doc2doc

We featured doc2doc, the new physician community from the 160-year old BMJ, on the International panel at Health 2.0 in the US last Fall. It’s now grown to more than 20,000 registered physicians from the UK, India, Europe, North America and elsewhere. David is a veteran journalist who joined the BMJ in March 2008 as editor of bmj.com having spent most of the past decade running web and editorial at the UK Food Standards Agency.

Thomas Skoglund, Neurosurgic

Thomas is a neurosurgeon at Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Sweden. When he and fellow Swedish colleague Steen Fridriksson couldn’t find what they needed in terms of resources and dialogue with peers in their specialty on the web, they decided to take up the challenge themselves. Neurosurgic, their creation, today serves neurosurgeons from 195 countries and they’re hoping to add the missing 5 countries soon.

Pierre-Emmanuel Aubert, Santé Log

French physician turned entrepreneur, business angel, and business school lecturer, Pierre-Emmanuel has founded several companies in the health care space as well as the first French Life Science Business Angels’ Association. Today he’s going to show us SantéLog, the French health care professionals’ portal that encourages members to generate content regularly.

Alex Savic, CEO, Alensa NextWidgets

Alensa combines pure e-commerce, health information (including interaction with real physicians) and community building, which Alex introduced to us at health 2.0 in 2008. We got a sneak peak of the new eCommerce platform in october 2009, but today Alex is going to show us the latest iteration—NextWidgets, an online shop miniaturized to the size of a banner ad.

Lisa Ware, Nutritionist, Imperative Health

Lisa is a nutritionist who works in program development and peer collaboration at Imperative Health, which uses a combination of bio-feedback from devices, online coaching and psychology to change patient behavior. Imperative’s goal is to get patients at risk for heart disease to manage their weight and reduce their risks. Three peer reviewed articles suggest that it really works. Imperative Health is the result of five years development in the labs at Unilever. And you thought they just made soap!

Fred Goldstein, UK Preventive Medicine

U.S. Preventive Medicine acquired Fred’s innovative disease management company, Specialty Disease Management Services, in 2007. USPM focuses on selling its Prevention Plan to employers in the US. The Prevention Plan is working for Fred who’s now looking more like the high-school gymnast he used to be! Now launching in the UK, Fred’s here to show us what it takes to get Brits thinking about their health—we assume it’s hard work.

David Doherty, Head of Business Development, 3G Doctor

David helped start 3G Doctor, which is a remote care solution that gets patients private and economical access to a registered Doctor. The difference in 3G Doctor’s approach is that the access is via a 3G mobile phone, of which there are more than 10 million in the UK and Ireland. David has been working with patients, doctors, the mobile developer communities and medical technologists to understand ways in which 3G Doctor can deliver new care experiences.

Roy Schoenberg, CEO, American Well

American Well has really shaken up the environment for online care in the US. American Well’s first installation (and frequent flier mileage generator) in Hawaii in 2009 captured national attention in the US, and deals with Optum, TriCare, and Blues plans in Minnesota and upstate New York have followed—not to mention a trip to the White House and a few presentations at Health 2.0! Before American Well, Roy was the inventor and founder of CareKey Inc, the health management system bought by Trizetto in 2005.

Joris Moolenaar, Director, IPPZ

Joris is the Director of IPPZ’s work in ehealth and ICT innovation. Today Joris is going to show Mijntherapie (Mytherapy), a secure online environment for mental health consultations that can be used by any practitioner wanting to connect with patients. For those of you practicing your Dutch, IPPZ stands for Innovatie Psychologische Psychiatrische Zorg or Psychological and Psychiatric Care Innovation.

Roni Zeiger, Chief Health Strategist, Google

Launched after much anticipation in 2008, Google Health has been steadily adding features and partners, as it becomes a platform which helps consumers both store and collect their medical data, and use services related to it. Roni, an internal medicine physician, has been at Google Health since the start, but he still finds time to occasionally practice urgent care medicine and present at almost every Health 2.0 Conference.

Sabine Pinedo, Patient Enabling Director, stichting Begeleide Zelfzorg (sBZ)

Sabine, a specialist in Vascular Medicine, was practicing at in Amsterdam’s university hospital when she launched the non-profit stichting begeleide Zelfzorg (sbZ) which means Foundation for Supported Selfcare. sbZ started out as a on-line anti-coagulation clinic, and has morphed into a patient self-management and physician communication network. It’s now offered through Mediq, the Netherlands’ largest pharmacy chain. More recently Sabine & sbZ won a €775.000 prize from the Dutch government and are rolling out a new cardiovascular risk management on-line support service. Of course, those of you who just survived this harsh European winter are probably wondering why she ever left her birthplace of Curaçao in the Caribbean.

Neil Williams, EMEA Business Development Manager, Microsoft

Neil runs Heathvault’s business in Europe and has been very busy lately, particularly with the announcement that Healthvault will be working with Siemens in Germany. In the US, Microsoft’s team have spent lots of effort making HealthVault a platform for data from both health systems and medical devices, as well as creating the MyHealthInfo application layer—which debuted at Health 2.0 last October. And there’s plenty of speculation about whether a new government in the UK may use HealthVault as the cornerstone of a revamped health records initiative. We assume Neil knows who’s going to win the upcoming election! If the answer surprises anyone, Neil’s certificate in emergency cardiac support may come in handy.

Mohammad Al-Ubaydli, Founder, Patients Know Best

Patients Know Best is a PHR platform that connects to Bupa, NHS Choices and more. While Mo’s got extensive experience working in the US, both at the National Institutes for Health and with the famed consultants the Advisory Board Company, since his return to Europe he’s been recognized as running one of the top start-ups in Europe by Seedcamp and BusinessWeek. Somewhere in there he’s found time to write 6 books and run one of the first UK HealthCamps.

Isabelle Adenot, President, French National Order of Pharmacists

Isabelle is the first female President of the National Council of Pharmacists, a position to which she was elected in July 2009. Today she’s going to demonstrate the “Pharmaceutical Record” or Dossier Pharmaceutique which is a shared electronic record examining all medicines—including prescription medicines and OTCs—dispensed to a patient in any community pharmacy in France, for the purpose of reducing prescription and delivery error. This program, which was developed and paid for by the pharmacists themselves, was championed by Isabelle, and its results are very impressive. When Denise last checked on March 8, 13,569 French pharmacies had issued nearly 7 million records.

Etienne Caniard, President, Commission of Medical Information Quality and Dissemination, French National Authority for Health (HAS)

Etienne is in charge of the French government’s policy on health information quality. It is under his watch that the HAS developed a relation with the HON Foundation to certify French health web sites. He has a very extensive background as a civil servant in many French government departments and commissions covering clinical, ethical, innovation, research and public health. Before he was appointed to the National Authority for Health, he was in charge of health at the Mutualité Française, a “complementary insurance” covering over 38 million French citizens. But today we’re asking Etienne to reflect on what he’s heard and talk to us about how Health 2.0 might fit into France’s national health policy.

Pieter Vos, Raad voor de Volksgezondheid en Zorg (Council for Public Health and Health Care)

Pieter Vos is a psychologist who has been running the Council for Health and Care (rVZ) and its predecessor since 1994. Pieter is a member of several Supervisory boards and Advisory Councils in healthcare, but we’ve invited him here because his organization has just completed a study into the future of Health 2.0 in the Netherlands. Because in health care (and in many other spheres of life) where the Netherlands leads many countries follow, we’re excited to hear about their plans.

Morten Elbæk Petersen, Managing Director, sundhed.dk

Morten is an economist by training who has been has been Managing Director of the National Danish e-health Portal since May 2002. Denmark has genuinely been leading the way in ehealth adoption across Europe and the world for more than a decade. It probably has a greater share of its citizens connecting electronically with their physicians and health records than any other country. We’ve invited Morten here to give us a glimpse of the future, and to comment on what Health 2.0 might mean in a world where ehealth already works.

Frank Neumann, Chairman, BIG direkt gesund

Starting as a social insurance clerk back in the early 1980s, Frank worked his way up through Germany’s health insurance sector to join the board of BIG in 1997, around the time the company emerged from the Federal Guild of Hearing Aid Acousticians. BIG is now the first online and direct insurer in Germany, covering over 390,000 people in a decidedly non-traditional way. Frank will show us how BIG uses the Internet, 24 hour customer service, and an extensive range of increased benefits to engage its members.

Paul Hodgkin, PatientOpinion

Paul has been a GP for 25 years and he still practices for a day a week as a salaried GP. But in 2006 he founded Patient Opinion, a site where Brits tell the story of their hospital experiences. Perhaps even more remarkably he’s managed to get both the NHS and trusts (both hospitals and primary care trusts) to pay to find out what people are saying about them. Another reason Paul’s here today is that Health 2.0’s Matthew Holt met him last year and was a bit disturbed that someone from Sheffield knew more about Web 2.0 than he did!

Don Kemper, CEO, Healthwise

With wife and colleague Molly Mettler, Don is rightly famous in the US public health community. He’s guided healthwise to becoming one of the leading sources of health information for patients and consumers. Along the way they’ve sold millions of copies of the Healthwise Handbook and now support thousands of web sites with great information. And part of the reason Don is here is because Healthwise is expanding into France, where Don already knew Denise, although another reason he’s here is that he likes debating with Matthew Holt.

Jean-Pascal Del Bano, Le Guide Santé

Jean-Pascal is a public health specialist who has been working in health care with his partner Stéphane Bach for more than a decade. In 2008 the pair decided to tackle the thorny problem of helping consumers evaluate French hospitals by creating a comparison web site, based on a mix of user-generated content and government data. Today they’re going to show us the latest version of the site, and they’ve already become the supplier of hospital information to Le Figaro magazine and Web site, a leading French news publication.

Emma Stanton, Psychiatric Registrar and (former) Clinical Advisor to the Chief Medical Officer at the Department of Health

Emma is a rockstar masquerading as a psychiatrist. In her relatively brief medical career she has—take a deep breath—founded BAMMbino, the junior doctors arm of the British Association of Medical Managers; created the consulting company Diagnosis; been a Clinical Advisor to Sir Liam Donaldson (Chief Medical officer at the UK Department of Health); been named an Emerging Leader to the National Leadership Council, chaired by the Chief Executive of the NHS; picked up an MBA from Imperial College, London; and edited the book Clinical Leadership: Bridging the Divide. Right now she’s back in practice at South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation trust, but will soon be moving to Boston to be Commonwealth Fund Harkness Fellow in health policy with Don Berwick and Elliott Fisher. Oh, and if you weren’t already intimidated, she’s also a Round the World yachtswoman!

Len Starnes, Director, Global e-Business, Bayer Schering Pharma

Len Starnes runs global e-business for Bayer Schering Pharma’s Primary Care business unit and is their specialist in healthcare social networking, enterprise search engine marketing, and integrated multi-channel patient relationship management. In his pre-Schering life Len —a Brit now living in Germany—ran corporate communications for Raychem in France, public affairs for Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry in London, and got an MBA in Boston. So it makes perfect sense that he has multiple degrees in solid-state physics.

Sylvie St-Laurent, Head of Alliance Development & Stakeholder Engagement, Pfizer

Sylvie leads Pfizer’s European Public Affairs team and is responsible for liaising and fostering partnerships with European patient advocacy groups especially in specific disease areas. Until 2009 she represented Pfizer in Brussels interfacing with European institutions on industry and public health policies. While Health 2.0 may be relatively new to Pfizer and the pharmaceutical industry, Sylvie’s no stranger to new trends which significantly impact established industries. Earlier in her career she led the Forest Products Association of Canada’s first public advisory panel on environmental protection standards and developed new industry benchmarks for sustainability reporting.

Daniel Ghinn, Director of Digital Engagement, Creation Interactive

Daniel helps healthcare organizations around the world make sense of the way the Internet is changing healthcare. His e-journal Healthcare Engagement Strategy shines a light on new forms of engagement and communication in health care, and today he’ll show us a very innovative (and some say invasive!) social media campaign he created about drug counterfeiting.

Sophie Kune, Community Manager, ParleAvecElles

Sophie’s background is in image consulting for brands and individuals. She is also a professional blogger. Put them all together and you’ll understand why she’ll be showing us ParleAvecElles, the online community where breast cancer patients discuss beauty and fashion. Sophie also manages, in partnership with Roche, the blog FemmesAvantTout.

René Hansen, Global Director Marketing & Access Innovation, UCB

René has been playing a driving role in the transformation of uCb from a hybrid group into a fully focused biopharma company. But we’re most interested in the strategic partnership René created between UCB and the US based Health 2.0 company PatientsLikeMe, whom you heard from yesterday. The partnership aims to build and connect with the community of epilepsy patients and their caregivers and is the first time a pharma company has openly engaged with an online community to study the real-world impact of epilepsy. We expect more partnerships like this to come, so we’re fascinated by what René has discovered so far.

Gábor Gyarmati, CEO, Webbeteg Ltd.

There’s clearly something in the water in Hungary. While ReliefInSite, HealthMash and other Health 2.0 companies have development facilities there, Gábor’s Szinapszis Research owns the patient site Webbeteg, its teenager version Kamaszpanasz and the physicians’ site DrPortal. Gábor has also visited Health 2.0 in the US and gifted us some interesting brandy named after the President (Barack means cherry in Hungarian)! While we could have put Gábor in virtually any category in this conference, we asked him to come on this panel to share his experience with working with pharmaceutical companies in a restrictive regulatory environment.

Annabel Bentley, Medical Director, Bupa

Annabel is Bupa’s Assistant Medical Director, and she’s responsible for health content and tools for customers across the Bupa group. Although best known as a mutual health insurance company in the UK, Bupa has over ten million customers in more 190 countries and employs over 52,000 people around the world. That includes its 2007 purchase of American disease management company Health Dialog—a sign that Bupa is very interested in figuring out how citizens and patients can better lead healthier lives. Annabel has been following Health 2.0 since we started and we’re delighted to hear how she’s putting it into practice internationally.

Jean Louis Laporte, Tribu Cancer

The Association TribuCancer was created by Jean-Louis’ wife Nathalie Laporte, a cancer patient living with her family on an isolated island off the coast of Brittany. She used the Internet to build a support network to help her through the nights. Her wish was that all patients and caregivers could one day benefit from distance assistance thanks to the Internet. A successful businessman, Jean-Louis Laporte switched careers to help fulfill Nathalie’s wish. Tribu Cancer is growing by leaps and bounds and we are looking forward to hearing his perspectives on the future of Health 2.0.

Elettra Ronchi, Coordinator of Health ICT Projects, OECD, Paris

Elettra currently shares responsibility for a project geared towards “understanding the drivers and barriers to the adoption of Electronic Health Records across OECD countries.” A PhD graduate in genetics and neurology with a research career at distinguished institutions, as well as training in health system management and risk analysis, Elettra is well-positioned to help us understand the complexity of Health 2.0…and not to forget that her office is near Denise’s.