Claude Earl Fox, M.D., M.P.H., Deputy Assistant Secretary for Health (Disease Prevention and Health Promotion), U.S. Department for Health and Human Services

Thank you, Mark.  We want to welcome all the participants to this
second Partnerships Conference, our participants who are present as
we as our virtual participants.  We have today, I understand, 13
downlinks and 17 internet participants and we are certainly glad not
just to be talking about the technology, but actually using it. We
hope the participants at our remote sites will follow up with a
lively discussion, after the presentations, as we plan to do as
well.

I'd like to take a minute to acknowledge sponsors and contributors
to this conference. First is the Annenberg Center for allowing us to
hold the conference.  Behind this center, the staff makes it work.
I'd like to thank Mick, Kevin,  Karen Synder, and many others who
have worked hard putting this conference together.

I would also like to thank Robert Ward Johnson for the generous
grant they provided to the conference which will help us extend the
reach of this conference outside this room through the both
satellite conference as well as the virtual conference.  Their
support is yet another example of their willingness to be involved
in health philanthropy.

I would like to thank Neal Flanders, and Paul Tarini for their help.

I would like to thank the following groups and their directors for
their help with many aspects of this conference:

Our office, The Office of Disease Prevention and Health
Promotion and our staff -- Mary Jo Deering

     Agency for Health Care policy Research

     The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

     The National Library of Medicine

     IEEE-USA under Dr. Michael McDonald (Chair of the plenary
     session).  He is at the center of these events at this conference

     IBI publishing

     Vice President of Health Care Financing Association

Finally, I'd like to ask all of the members of the conference
organizing committee to stand because without them, this conference
certainly wouldn't have happened.

[applause]

I'd like to say what we have to do here for the next 2 days.--our
job both individually and together is to look carefully at the
dizzying array of exciting approaches for informing and educating
people about their health.  This field is accelerating at warp speed
around us and will continue to do so.  We basically have 3 tasks
here.   The first is to articulate the key issues in the field; the
second is to clarify the roll of players in the field, and finally
to look at the next steps we can take.

Please keep these steps in mind as you work through today and
tomorrow and hopefully you'll come prepared to the closing session
tomorrow night to catch the substance of our discussion.  We hope
that your recommendations also will help us shape many of the key
directions we might go also within the Department of Health and
Human Services.  We all need to look for ways to add new value to
our enterprise, and to gear our efforts more towards improving the
health and well-being of real people.  We can benefit from the
collective experience that we have here -- not only in the
programs, but also in the audience.

With all that, let's get started.  I'd like to introduce Dr. Peter
Juhn, the Director of Special Studies at the Kaiser Foundation
Health Plan.  Before I get into specifics, Dr. Juhn was strongly
praised at Kaiser as the expert in interactive health communication
for patients and providers.  As many of us are aware, Kaiser has
long been a leader of increased patient-consumer information flow.

We are here in my opinion on the cutting edge in consumer health
care informatics -- particularly in managed care.  Dr. Juhn has done
research of provider/patient knowledge tools that can drive
improvements in health care efficiency and quality.

He has held the prestigious Robert Ward Johnson fellowships.  Dr.
Juhn's M.D. is from Harvard University and he also holds a Master's
Degree in public health from the University of Washington.

Dr. Juhn...