Everyone in the “health 2.0” world knows that the Health 2.0 conference is the conference in the health 2.0 world. It’s where everybody has to be, if they want to be known in that high-powered innovator world. Proof got even deeper when, a couple of years ago, they shifted venue from downtown San Francisco to the belly of the beast: Silicon Valley.
Less well known is that Health 2.0 has a number of outlying communities, and one is in Sacramento, the state capital. Next month I’ll be speaking there, at a free event open to the public.
It’s 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. at Hacker Lab, 1715 I Street. Register here! And here’s the Health 2.0 Sacramento site. Tentative agenda:
6:30 – 7:15 Mingling and Munchies
7:15 Kickoff
7:30-8:15 e-Patient Dave (including time for Q&A)
8:15-8:30 Mingling
A special thanks to one of my earliest Twitter buddies, @GoodLaura – Laura Good – who, it happens, is a startup geek in that very area and involved with Health 2.0. My first private twitter messages with Laura were in 2009! (If you must know, it was about some typesetting arcana that were raising puzzles in Microsoft Word.) How sweet it is to cross paths IRL with long-time online peeps!
Regular readers know that a large part of my becoming a global advocate has been the vision and influence of Lucien Engelen at Radboud University Medical Center (RUMC) in the town of Nijmegen, on The Netherlands’ eastern border. Way back in 2010 he announced that his upcoming TEDx would be primarily about patients; the TED Talk I did there put my speaking career into a catapult; then he put his own money where his mouth is by launching the 
#PatientsIncluded initiative, saying he would not attend any event where patients weren’t actively encouraged to participate; and he has continued to lead in thoughts and actions, every year since (including 3D-printing my lung metastases last year, below). Lucien is the standard, the exemplar of the “pay me with action” clause of 
For that reason, when he asked me this summer to participate in something even newer – something brand new – I immediately said yes. What was it? A three day event, “Inaugural Grand Rounds,” launching a completely redesigned curriculum at RUMC – redesigned with patients participating in the process. Yes, patients – people with no medical experience – except as “the ultimate stakeholders”; as patients, helping guide how we teach students.
