Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2009, 6 521 communities. Second, at some websites, individuals creating or interacting with the data can help to stratify it with relevancy and abstraction layers by actively engaging in collaborative filtering, tagging, voting and other standard Internet community data management techniques or passively, by having their attention recorded as page views. Third, individuals such as expert patients are becoming value- added health information resources themselves through their self-knowledge and community participation. Health social networks and other peer-based resources such as patient registries by condition could proliferate and be formalized into tools analogous to the Wikipedia which has emerged as a widely useful consumer-produced information resource. Structurally, the life sciences field is changing in three ways, the concept of health, how science is being conducted, and the models by which health care is realized. In the first case, the notion of health is changing as patient-driven models help to expand the definition of health and health care as depicted in Figure 1. Individuals may have the time, interest and utility to tinker with different tiers of the health concept, thinking creatively about and experimenting with cures, especially for pharmaceutically- uninteresting or complex orphan diseases, improving and resolving chronic conditions, measuring and reaching baseline normalization, increasing wellness, preventing disease and engaging in genetic and physical enhancement as possible. In the second case, how science is being conducted and who is conducting it is also being influenced by patient-driven health care models. Individuals can focus on personally-relevant aspects of health, formulating important and possibly novel areas of inquiry, collecting data about their experiences and finding others with similar interests and conditions with whom to collaborate and mobilize resources. Rather than forming a hypothesis at the outset, individuals may engage in self- tracking, analyzing the resulting data and using self-experimentation as a tool for improvement; for the individual, understanding the underlying mechanism may be irrelevant if desired outcomes are obtained. Mathematical modeling, simulation and synthetic biology are also redefining and adding to the way that science is being conducted by traditional professionals and could potentially have an even more powerful impact if they were to be made available in easy-to-use consumer offerings. Many tools are freely available but not packaged in accessible ways for different user groups, for example Stanford’s SimTK biological structure simulation models (http://www.simtk.org) and synthetic biology’s DNA parts database which contained over 3,500 standardized building blocks as of December 2008 (http://www.partsregistry.org). In the third case, the ways that health care is realized are also changing through patient-driven health care models. Early examples include health social networks, direct-to-consumer personalized medicine services, self-tracking communities and non-reimbursed clinics for preventive medicine and other interventions. The creative exploration of individuals focusing on a much wider concept of health could further add to the value chain of health services, extending them from the traditional model of general diagnostic and urgent care providers with high expertise (e.g.; physicians and hospitals) to new areas. An interesting array of alternative models and entrepreneurial services could arise, for example on-demand physician consultation as a standard service, personalized genomics interpretation and intervention offerings as genetic information becomes more clinically relevant, and fully automated tools for personal quantified self-tracking and environmental monitoring.