7th Annual Connected-Health Symposium
On October 21 and 22nd, I had the opportunity to attend a symposium in Boston, organized by the Center for Connected Health, which is a division of Partners Healthcare.
This is a unique conference in which academics, providers, and government come together to share thoughts and ideas on new healthcare approaches, driven by new emerging technologies (robotics, genomics, and new Intranet solutions for healthcare). Also, there were many vendors showing their latest solutions that address this years’ conference theme:
The Way Forward: Reforms New Focus on Health and Wellness, Independent Aging, Chronic Condition Self-Care and the Tools That Support Them.
The organizers, Joe Kvedar, MD; Joe Ternullo, JD, MPH; and Khinlei Myint-U, MBA, should be given kudos for attracting some great speakers. The event was well attended, with over a 1,000 attendees — apparently a conference record — which is commendable in this recession era, though a large number were from the neighborhood: nearby Harvard, its med school, Partners, and Mass General. Connected Health reports 42 exhibitors, but there seemed to be more, as they could barely be housed in the mezzanine of the Park Plaza Hotel and Towers. Next year, with any growth, they may need to seek out a larger facility — a nice problem to have in these economically constrained times.
One thing that I particularly liked about the conference were the presentations that focused on the behavioral (psycho-social) influencers and just how important they are to healthcare, whether it be motivating employees to contribute to a health savings plan or figuring out how to best recruit and retain patients with chronic conditions for remote home telemonitoring programs or smoking cessation.
The first day keynoters included Kevin Davies who talked about implications of genomic sequencing tests that are now available and for $1,000; you can have 500 tests run from a sample of saliva. So now it’s not, “Can we?” (we can) but, “Should we?” and what are the implications. BJ Fogg, director of Stanford’s Persuasive Technology Lab, followed with a talk on “Designing for behavior change: Hot triggers for new habits and challenges in influencing behavior change using technologies like the Internet. This is not a hard science, and he acknowledges that changing behavior is hard individually (think smoking cessation), even though overall human behavior may be predictable. So start small, do experiments that are simple and executable. Make mistakes. Learn. Try again. Effective triggers are aimed at helping us do what we want to do. They are most effective when we put hot triggers in the path of motivated people.
More than any other conference I’ve attended, there were many book launches and signings at the conference — nine in all. Connected Health provides a useful list of authors with bios and links to Amazon.com on the symposium website.
A true “ah-hah” moment for me came during a one-to-one interview with Dr. Roy Schoenberg, MD, MPH, preident and CEO of a company started in 2006, called American Well. Using the Internet, the company provides online patient/physician consultation services in near real time with a patient going online and requesting a consultation for a particular medical problem with a physician who is on call at that time. A database identifies participating physicians who are available to consult immediately with the patient. The patient’s health problem and history are made available for review by accessing large patient databases quickly. Patient or physician can opt out of the consult at will. Fees are low. No waiting for appointments. Physicians are even insured for each consultation. I think you will be hearing more about American Well in the near future.
Day Two of the conference featured more great presentations including a keynote by Dr. Sheena Iyengar from Columbia Business School on the Art of Choosing. Many of the panelists in the breakout groups were among the best and brightest in this field. My only frustration was that some of the presentation topics that were compellingly titled in the program were never addressed by the panel. A little more rigor would be appreciated. Or is it just me?
All told, this is conference is filled with lots of new ideas and smart participants and worth considering for 2011.