Nature Network Boston will be tweeting live from this week’s Connected Health Symposium in Boston.

From the program:

The Way Forward: Reform’s New Focus on Health and Wellness, Independent Aging, Chronic Condition Self-Care and the Tools That Support Them

As gridlock threatens elsewhere, the responsibility for driving change falls directly to us — the patients, payers, physicians, hospital leaders, entrepreneurs and IT execs who experience healthcare every day. Please join us in Boston in October. Together we’ll discuss and debate the means of moving care beyond the hospital and clinic and into the day-to-day lives of those who need our help.

Parnters’ Center for Connected Health has a broader mission:

The term “connected health” reflects the range of opportunities for technology-enabled care programs and the potential for new strategies in healthcare delivery.

The Center for Connected Health, a division of Partners HealthCare in Boston, develops innovative and effective solutions for delivering quality patient care outside of the traditional medical setting. The Center engages in pioneering research in a wide range of connected health-related areas and works to advance the field through its convening and publishing activities.

The center sponsors the meeting and patients play a big role.

For more on the wired patients, see the The Society for Participatory Medicine or this recent story in SciAm.

Individuals are becoming more informed, choosy consumers. Moreover, their charge to take over their own healthcare goes even deeper than traditional approaches to health. In some cases—more than imagined by many industry experts—patients already opt for lifestyle changes over prescription medicines when possible. In addition, consumers insist on evidence, such as examples of real-world outcomes from patients like themselves, before they will pay for a treatment or endure one that might not produce the desired outcome.