Rise of the e-patient and citizen-centric public health

Abstract

In the early 2000s as Google went from a Stanford graduate student project to becoming a verb we began to notice something interesting happening with search and health care. More and more people were using the Web to find information about health and how to manage their conditions. A mere six months after Google acquired YouTube in late 2006 we were discussing technology and health trends at the Institute for the Future and realized that we needed to do devote some major research time to understanding how consumers and patients were creating YouTube channels to share health information and knowledge.