Holding their first joint conference, partisans of Health 2.0 and Ix (Information Therapy) agreed that the U.S. health delivery system needs reform and that technology can provide the means to do so - but disagreed on the prescription for change.

Information Therapy and Health 2.0 have few assumptions in common, noted Don Kemper, CEO of HealthWise and a founder of the Ix movement. But, he added, "there is a common purpose - to share information to support better decisions and better health."

Kemper's remarks came in the opening session of the "Health 2.0 meets Ix" conference in Boston, styled as the first "great debate" of the two-day confab that looks at how new Internet-enabled technologies can transform healthcare. Kemper defined Ix as "the prescription of the right information to the right person at the right time as part of the process of care."

Where Ix emphasizes evidence-based content and decision support integrated into the existing provider-patient relationship to produce better outcomes for common illnesses, he said Health 2.0 excels at experiential knowledge, spread virally, often about rare and complex conditions.

While the two approaches are not necessarily at odds, Kemper noted, many of the assumptions underlying each are mutually exclusive.

Defending Health 2.0 was gadfly-blogger Matthew Holt of The Health Care Blog, who said that the 2.0 movement harnessed technology to enable patients to play a greater, more participatory role in their own care. The collective wisdom of self-interested patients, he argued, could lead to better outcomes than the professionally trained medical provider. "Ladies and gentlemen," Holt said at one point, "we are the experts."

For a legion of tech-physicians in the audience - many using Twitter to comment on the debate (Twitter users can search for #health2con) - the difference came down to an issue of information-trust: the best thinking of doctors (Ix), or the best thinking of many patients who have undergone similar experiences. And several suggested the two, while grounded in opposites, need to complement each other.

"Won't the world be interesting when physicians and patients both have an incentive to improve outcomes?" asked Danny Sands, MD.

One respondent to the debate was Alan Greene, MD, a pediatrician and founder of DrGreene.com. "We need both the wisdom of the crowds and the wisdom of the expert," he said.