But How Will It Affect Me? An Xconomy Forum on Consumers, Innovation, and Opportunities in Health IT

These are days of tremendous changes in healthcare, as legislative reforms take effect over the next four years in an effort to make healthcare available to everyone—and at a cost they can afford. At the same time, technology advances in Web-based services, wireless communications, and other information technologies offer new possibilities to lower health costs. Still, amid all the talk about payers and providers, electronic medical records, and wireless health, a question lingers—what’s in it for the consumer?

We mean to address that question through our next Xconomy Forum in San Diego, an evening event called Healthcare in Transition—The Consumer Payoff, set for Wednesday, November 17.

I’m excited to announce the group of industry visionaries we’ve assembled from San Diego and beyond to explain the promise and the possibilities for consumers as innovations in health IT help shift the focus of medical care from healing and curing to prevention.

Kevin Patrick, director of the Center for Wireless and Population Health Systems at UC San Diego, will be setting the stage with an overview of the prospects and potential of the kinds of innovations in health IT that will help consumers take charge of their health. Patrick, who also is the editor-in-chief of The American Journal of Preventive Medicine, oversees programs at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology that address obesity/diabetes, smoking, and other health issues by using mobile devices, social networking, and health IT technology to promote behavior change.

For our main event, we have assembled an outstanding panel of leaders in health IT for a highly interactive discussion: Nat Findlay, founder and CEO of Quebec-based Myca Health; Arlene Harris, co-founder and chairwoman of GreatCall/Jitterbug; Bill Spooner, CIO for Sharp HealthCare in San Diego; and Jean Balgrosky, the former CIO for Scripps Health in San Diego.

After the panel, we’ll hear brief 4-minute “burst” presentations from the CEOs of a couple of the most innovative healthcare startups in San Diego: MediPacs’ Mark McWilliams and Independa’s Kian Saneii. After that, there will be plenty of time for networking with the speakers and fellow attendees.

So if you’d like to join the conversation, which will be held at Johnson & Johnson’s offices in San Diego, mark your calendars for the evening of November 17 and register here now. I hope to see you there.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.