Interesting report. Found a lot of intersting facts for myself.

Good info for all health care professionals

Having adapted this platform clearly illustrates the forward, proactive leadership necessary to develop and exchange solutions to such an important topic. The platform enables clear and connected ideas to be exchanged and as such can lead to concepts that can foster viable alternatives for today and tomorrow. Applause for this effort.

Connectologist -- Thanks for taking the time to post your comments. We definitely understand the desire for full transparency. We also realize -- and wrote about in the report -- the importance of synthesizing feedback that you receive from citizens into something actionable for policymakers; otherwise, you may just wind up with a lot of ideas but no clear actions that should follow from them. Your point is an understandable one; translating from the ideas and concerns of the average person to policy principles is never one-to-one process. In this case, we chose a Panel of Fellows of the National Academy -- folks who bring deep expertise in government, health IT, privacy, and civic engagement -- to do the translating, based both on what they heard here and their own knowledge and ability to add context. We hope we got it right, and try to be up-front about the fact that the conclusions in this report reflect what the Panel thinks it heard from those who participated -- nothing more, nothing less. It's worth noting, though, that all the data that forms the basis for these conclusions remains publicly available to anyone at http://www.thenationaldialogue.org/he.... Head to that site and you'll have literally every piece of data that the Panel had when forming its conclusions, and we'd be well pleased if you and other citizens looked at that data and formed your own conclusions! Civic engagement was always the overriding goal of this exercise, and if we've inspired anyone to think more deeply about the issue or try harder to understand peoples' desires for their personal health care and privacy -- even if that thinking leads to disagreement with the conclusions we've outlined here -- we call that a success. Thanks again for reading and posting your comments. Best, The National Dialogue Team

While it seems many of the goals of this project were successfully met, there remain some serious gaps. The analysis and conclusions based on the user generated discussion are totally opaque, rendering claims of "transparent democracy" are unfulfilled by the end result as presented in the report. Claims of "participatory democracy" are likewise compromised -- certainly there was participation in the front end, yet there's no visibility into how (or if) this participation influenced the end product. It seems that the first half of a participatory policy forum were successfully met. Delivering on the transparency promise requires that the back end of the process provide the same degree openness and disclosure. The appropriate black box of policy making is in the actual development of policy, not in the drawing of conclusions and recommendations from participatory input sought from the public and independent industry experts.