The Connected Health Symposium is this week. Without a doubt it’s our best yet. Attendance is tracking ahead of last year. We have more exhibitors and sponsors. We have excellent content (more on that in a moment) and a variety of workshops, demos and activities that will make the meeting just plain fun.
The biggest change this year is that we can now say, unabashedly, that there is a market for connected health and it is growing. Last year, the sessions set a beautiful context for where our Center – and all of us interested in new models of healthcare delivery — needed to take our programs. The focus on behavioral economics (Ubel), social networks (Christakis) and disruptive innovation (Hwang) were all spot on for driving innovative thinking.
This year is no different and promises to be better still. There is plenty of attention paid to the psychology of behavior change (keynotes by BJ Fogg, Cory Kidd, Sheena Iyengar and Kevin Volpp, as well as a number of breakouts). This is critical for us to understand as an industry and the contributions are far flung (from psychology, to marketing, to psychiatry, to business and economics), which makes it hard to do any sort of cataloguing. I’m looking forward to these talks.
We also have a number of sessions on how healthcare reform and HITECH will drive the market for connected health. These include presentations by Partners’ CEO Gary Gottlieb as well as Network President Tom Lee. There is great potential for health reform to drive connected health adoption, if we as an industry make sure we are in the right conversations and have solid proof points to illustrate our value in achieving quality, access and efficiency.
We managed to attract journalists including Bill Bulkeley and Scott Kirsner to lead panels talking to a variety of innovators. These sessions promise to be outstanding, with discussions moderated by professional interviewers.
There are a few sessions dedicated to advances in technologies, including wireless and sensor. Advances in both of these fields have been breathtaking and allow us to achieve the vision of a truly connected, quantified health measurement platform. Likewise there is attention, again, to social networks, which give us the vehicle to share information about the quantified self to others in ways that may motivate us to achieve better health.
We will also examine the effect mid-term election results will have on health care policy. There is a keynote on the implications of the advances in genetic sequencing on connected health – something that I’ve had my eye on for some time.
In addition this year, there are pre-conference workshops on Wednesday, the usual variety of networking events and several demos of products that are on the market making a difference in patient care and wellness.
This brings me right back to my comment that there is a market for connected health. It is palpable. I’m excited for the Symposium this year.
If for some reason you have not yet registered, waste no time, and go to http://tinyurl.com/2797dsn to do so.
If for some reason (I can’t think of a legitimate one) you can’t be there, you can follow the conference on the twitterverse by searching hashtag #chs10.
I hope to see you in Boston this week! I can’t think of a better place for anyone who has an interest in connected health to be.