Frank Neumann, Chairman, BIG direkt gesund | Germany

Starting as a social insurance clerk back in the early 1980s, Frank worked his way up through Germany’s health insurance sector to join the board of BIG in 1997, around the time the company emerged from the Federal Guild of Hearing Aid Acousticians. BIG is now the first online and direct insurer in Germany, covering over 390,000 people in a decidedly non-traditional way. Frank will show us how BIG uses the Internet, 24 hour customer service, and an extensive range of increased benefits to engage its members.

Paul Hodgkin, PatientOpinion | UK

Paul has been a GP for 25 years and he still practices for a day a week as a salaried GP. But in 2006 he founded PatientOpinion, a site where Brits tell the story of their hospital experiences. Perhaps even more remarkably he’s managed to get both the NHS and trusts (hospitals) to pay to find out what people are saying about them.

Don Kemper, CEO, Healthwise | America

With wife and colleague Molly Mettler, Don is rightly famous in the U.S. public health community. He’s guided Healthwise to becoming one of the leading sources of health information for patients and consumers. Along the way they’ve sold millions of copies of the Healthwise handbook and now support thousands of websites with great information. And part of the reason Don is here is because Healthwise is expanding into France.

Daniel Ghinn, Director of Digital Engagement, Creation Interactive | UK

Daniel helps healthcare organizations around the world make sense of the way the Internet is changing healthcare. His e-journal Healthcare Engagement Strategy shines a light on new forms of engagement and communication in health care, and today he’ll show us a very innovative (and some say invasive!) social media campaign he created about drug counterfeiting.

Jean-Pascal Del Bano, Le Guide Santé | France

Jean-Pascal is a public health specialist who has been working in health care with his partner Stéphane Bach for more than a decade. In 2008 the pair decided to tackle the thorny problem of helping consumers evaluate French hospitals by creating a comparison web site, based on a mix of user-generated content and government data. Today they’re going to show us the latest version of the site, and they’ve already become the supplier of hospital information to Le Figaro, a leading French news publication.

Sophie Kune, Community Manager, ParleAvecElles | France

Sophie’s background is in image consulting for brands and individuals. She is also a professional blogger. Put them all together and you’ll understand why she’ll be showing us ParleAvecElles, the online community where breast cancer patients discuss beauty and fashion. Sophie also manages, in partnership with roche, the blog FemmesAvantTout.

Gábor Gyarmati, CEO, Webbeteg Ltd. | Hungary

While ReliefInSite, HealthMash and other Health 2.0 companies have development facilities there, Gabor’s Szinapszis research owns the patient site Webbeteg, its teenager version Kamaszpanasz and the physicians’ site Drportal. While we could have put Gabor in virtually any category in this conference, we asked him to come on this panel to share his experience with working with pharmaceutical companies in a restrictive regulatory environment.

Etienne Caniard, President, Commission of Medical Information Quality and Dissemination,
French National Authority for Health (HAS) | France

Etienne is in charge of the French government’s policy on health information quality. It is under his watch
that the hAS developed a relation with the HON Foundation to certifiy French health web sites. Before he was appointed to the National
Authority for health, he was in charge of health at the Mutualité Française, a “complementary insurance”
covering over 38 million French citizens. Here we’re asking Etienne to reflect on what he’s heard and
talk to us about how Health 2.0 might fit into France’s national health policy.

Denis Costello, Webmaster, Eurordis

Eurordis, an organization driving legislative support at the European level for rare disease associations, is now launching an online community with interactive tools for patients. Denis Costello from Ireland has been leading the project for 2 years as webmaster for Eurordis.