“Here are the important stories and why”. “5 experts surveyed say this product is the best”. “Our analysts rate this stock a Buy”. And perhaps most importantly, “Here’s your diagnosis, here’s your treatment”.

Historically, information dissemination was a top-down affair where large institutions and so-called experts analyzed hard-to-get-to data and provided their authoritative voice on what we should do. The general masses lacked the tools and until relatively recently, lacked the education, to probe or even challenge the expert advice. For example, according to a recent study from the U.S. Department of Education, in 1960 just 41.1% of Americans age 25 and over had completed high school or higher, whereas by 2007 that figure had increased to 85.5%.

In today’s highly educated and highly digital world, consumers are not only well-schooled but also well-trained to find and analyze information for themselves through the Internet. And increasingly they are also well-connected through online forums and social networks. In the area of healthcare, this empowerment is taking an even further turn as patients become more active in their own diagnosis and treatment. Last December, BusinessWeek ran an art article titled “Can Patients Cure Healthcare?” (Catherine Arnst, 12/15/08), in which critically-ill patients joined together, shared their medical history and even collaborated on experiments to treat their particular disorder. They would not or could not passively accept their fate as prescribed by the doctors, drug companies, and government regulators.

This “patients-as-partners” model is often called Health 2.0 and represents the broader trend of individual empowerment that is enabled as a result of wealth of information available on the internet, and the easy-to-use tools by which to search against this data. There are already precedents or parallels to this macro-trend, most notably in entertainment where the digitization of music has led to massive, and often illegal, distribution. The small number of gate-keepers, i.e. the music labels, could not stop the millions of persistent consumers who found new keys to getting their content. If not wisdom of the masses, perhaps it’s innovation of the masses. The question which we will discuss in a future blog, is what does this mean for the information industry? Can they fight the trend of consumer empowerment and digital distribution of content, or will they need to rapidly adopt new strategies and technologies to capitalize on this seemingly inevitable movement?

More to come…