Several people have already written about Forrestor’s prediction (http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=8555) of social networking by 2013. My question is, how widely excepted will these technoligies be in healthcare? Typically, healthcare is the last to adopt new technologies and in some cases is 5-10 years behind other industries. Several technologies that could be implemented that would help healthcare institutions interface with the public and those being:

Podcasts (provide evidence based recommendations by physicians and announcements about upcoming events)
Mashups (provide transparency for hospital quality and safety statistics as compared to the industry)
Blogs (for internal and external use to allow folks to interact with hospital leadership)

I guess we will we see how the next few years play out to see if these and other web 2.0 technologies are adopted by healthcare.