Highlights from Health 2.0: User-Generated Healthcare 2008

Last week, over 1,000 healthcare and technology industry leaders met in San Francisco for Health 2.0: User-Generated Healthcare 2008 . The conference co-founders, Matthew Holt, author of The Health Care Blog , and Indu Subaiya, MD, packed the two-day event with many presenters and panel discussions on “Web 2.0 technologies, healthcare, and all points between.” This post will share just a few of the many highlights from the event which we found particularly relevant to HIV/AIDS service providers.

Podcast Promotion Tips from Apple

Admiral Joxel Garcia, Assistant Secretary for Health

Pete Alcorn, Podcast Manager at iTunes. Photo courtesy of Personal Life Media on Flickr

Last week, Miguel Gomez, Director of AIDS.gov, sat down with Admiral Joxel Garcia, the U.S. Assistant Secretary for Health for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), to record a podcast about health and the Latino community in the U.S. As we mentioned in a past blog post, and in our “New Media Toolkit,” podcasts can be a simple way to gather and provide audio and/or video information to your target audience. But once you have created them, how can you help people find and subscribe to your podcasts?

To help us answer this question, we turned to Pete Alcorn, Manager of Podcasts at Apple’s iTunes, the largest podcast directory and the most common venue for people to subscribe to podcasts (Note: there are many other directories, including Zune, Odeo, and Podcast Alley ). Miguel and our colleague Fred Smith from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention met Pete at the New Media Expo in Las Vegas last summer.

Reaching Latinos with New Media for National Latino AIDS Awareness Day

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Tomorrow is National Latino AIDS Awareness Day (NLAAD). According to a recently released CDC fact sheet, Latinos represent only 15% of the total U.S. population, but make up 18% of new HIV infections. Among Latinos, men make up the vast majority of new HIV infections (76%), but Latino women are also at disproportionate risk for HIV. They are infected with HIV at a rate four times greater than white women.

In recognition of this important day, we’re continuing our conversation from last week by highlighting additional examples of using new media tools to reach the Latino community with HIV information.

Communities of Color and New Media Use: Part II

As we mentioned in our last post, after attending The United States Conference on AIDS we wanted to get a clearer understanding of internet and new media use among communities of color. To learn more we hosted a webinar, “Underserved Populations and New Media Use,” for over 100 of our Federal colleagues and their grantees (visit our podcast page for the slides and an audio recording of the webinar). Last week, we discussed the presentation by Fard Johnmar, Founder of Envision Solutions, LLC. Our other webinar speaker was Alejandro Garcia-Barbon, Senior Technical Advisor to IQ Solutions, Inc. He presented about the “Drugs + HIV > Learn the Link” Campaign of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA).