About 20 people showed up for my talk today (out of 250…not bad) called “Reforming Healthcare from the ground up.”

Yesterday, during the opening session all 250 of us introduced ourselves. One gentleman introduced himself as Mitch Kapor who was interested in Health IT. So I went up to him afterwards and asked if he’d like to be a co-leader of a talk about healthcare with me. He said yes. Then I said, “So what’s your story?”

He responded, “I founded Lotus Notes, the EFF, and I’m the chair of Mozilla.”

“Oh…right. I’ve heard of those things!”

We chatted for about 15 minutes about the state of healthcare and figured we were both pretty much aligned in all the right areas.

The talk today went extremely well. A tweet sent out from the session summed it up best:

“Great FOO session w mitch kapor and jay Parkinson…gave me hope for health IT.”

Andrew McLaughlin, the Chief Technology Officer of the United States of America, attended our talk. He said something today that really struck me…“When I took this job and started looking at healthcare, I just assumed that healthcare was doing even some basic stuff with IT. I quickly realized that I was wrong.”

Yes…healthcare is stuck in 1986. I’m glad I’m doing something about bringing healthcare to the 21st century…