Web 2.0 and medicine

For a number of years web 2.0 has been a buzzword. I've been caught up in the hype and explored it's use in a variety of situations, with limited success.

It would appear I'm not alone. In the web 2.0 world that relates to health professionals there appears to be no clear 'big winners'. Sure, there are lots of examples of 'web activities', for instance:

• Blogs e.g. clinical cases and images, BMJ editors and even this blog!
• Social networks e.g. sermo
• Wikis e.g. ganfyd, AskDrWiki
• Social bookmarking e.g. connotea

But none of these, as far as I can tell, have made in-roads into mainstream healthcare. As such, I'm starting to have my doubts. Has the hype caused me ignore one of my own rules - DO NOT BE LEAD BY TECHNOLOGY, BE LEAD BY THE USER?

It would appear that I'm not alone in my scepticism and this has just been addressed in the Health Care Blog, with the post 'Balloon Mania: Happy Birthday Health 2.0'. I'm not won over by the anecdote used but it does remind me that it's very early days...