Why Should We Embrace Web 2.0: to change medical management

I'm on vacation.  Vacation for me means having the opportunity to have fun with an education project that I don't get to do while I'm busy with residency.  My older sister, Jennifer Maichin and co-teacher Courtney Zaleski invited me to come into their class and dissect sheep hearts.  It was pretty cool.
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The technology at Mineola Middle School (a public school) was unreal.  The classroom has Smartboards, every student has an IPad, and there are 4 computers in each classroom.  Every lesson embraces the concept of Web 2.0.  They are interactive, they are real time, and they facilitate the logical and continuous transitions from teacher to student and back.
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Medicine is behind the times!  I work in a pretty up-to-date ED.  We have an incredibly powerful and user friendly operating and electronic records system.  We have video-conferencing translators, we take notes using Dragon, we use an electronic system to sign out patients to medicine services, and our senior residents carry IPads to better manage the flow of the department they are running. 
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But we haven't figured out how to completely embrace Web 2.0 like public Mineola Middle School has.  They have figured out how to use interactive web usage in a manner that changes management!  Isn't this the holy grail of any contribution to medicine?  When my attending asks me why I have my IPad in the ED, I need to justify it's presence.  And the answer should be, it changes my management in a productive way.
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Michelle Lin is asking for new blog ideas that she can support and help get off the ground (incubate).  This is a dream competition for me, and I'll hand in my submission later today, after I publish this post.  The new blog idea: I'll post about how Web 2.0 influences my management of specific patient encounters; and I will ask guests to write mini-case presentations of sorts, in which they report about seeing a patient and how a Web 2.0 activity changed how they treated that patient.  I think this information will not only be interesting, but extremely helpful to those who want to use the next generation of the Internet to facilitate better patient care. 
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