Are you using Google Health?

And I am not talking about making your Blog/Site healthy. I am talking about the new EMHR application from Google.  Have you used it? Have you even signed it? Even if you are the biggest privacy nut in the world you should log in and take a peek. Here are some of the features I saw:

-Share your Health Records

-Graphing Test Results

-Print your wallet card

Also check out these screenshots and this video to learn even more.  So what do you think? Will you be using this? Leave us a comment and win a prize.

Organizing without organizations: stroke 2

In yesterday’s post I focused on the growing perception by some people–especially young ones–that traditional cause-oriented organizations aren’t very agile, and it’s difficult to have much influence in them. So they’re going around established institutions and generating advocacy movements almost spontaneously using tools familiar to them like blogs and social networks: what Clay Shirkey calls “organizing without organizations.”

Most activist want to influence government policy at some level. For years letter-writing campaigns, blizzards of email to legislators and calls have been the tools in their kit. Often these efforts haven’t resulted in much response. Traditional advocacy organizations have adopted in recent years lobbying arms to get face-to-face with officials and use the leverage of their constituency to impress their message on them.

But suppose there was a new model of input in which government officials actually invited citizens to communicate with them and promised to use the submitted thoughts in policy formation? Well, there may be a glimmer of hope with the “change” President-elect Obama promised. The Obama transition team already has the website I mentioned before: Change.gov. Obama’s election was successful in part because they were able to use the community organization power of social networks and other online tools to involve a lot of people. The administration evidently intends to continue that practice into government.

Today former Senator Tom Daschle was nominated to be Secretary of DHSS and Director of  the White House Office on Health Reform. At the Change.gov website there is a section for the agenda item: Providing Health Care for All.

There you can fill in a form where you “tell your story” about why health care reform is important to you. And now there’s another place where you can sign up to host a health care reform discussion during the holidays; sort of a MeetUp in your home with a Christmas tree and eggnog.

To me the significance of all this is that these steps–if successful for the new administration–may set a model for more open communication and participation for politicians and agencies at federal, state and local levels. The self-advocacy and direct-to-constituent channels may grow, just as Clay Shirkey predicts.

Agile and aware advocacy organizations have a great opportunity to leverage the organization they already have to have influence through these new online channels. Or…they can just let the new generation of activists go around them.

Join the Obama Admin discussion about health care

Change.gov is the website set up by the “Office of the President Elect” to get citizen input about all the issues facing the Obama administration. One of them is what should be done about the health care system. You can put in your two-cents-worth (an old expression) by going to: http://change.gov/page/s/healthcare

Here’s their invitation:

It’s significant to me that Obama seems pretty committed to maintaining a dialog through internet forums.

Realtime gene sequencing gets closer

Back in the video Jeans…or Genes? I mentioned that Pacific Biosciences was claiming it was working on technology to sequence a whole human genome in 15 minutes! Sounded a lot like a boast to entice VC funding.

But they’ve gotten a step closer to making the thing a reality. According to Technology Review they now have a video of the technology at work in a proof-of- concept. There’s a movie on their site that explains how it all works.

So they’re standing by their claim that they’ll be doing genomes–maybe around 2013–in 15 min. for @$100!! So what? Well, having gene testing done dirt-cheap is a technology that is already making waves in the control structure of medicine and the healthcare system. The faster and cheaper the process, the more the impact.

Tomorrow’s going to be different.