Xconomy Forum on Health IT: Searching for the Consumer Payoff—or an App as Compelling as Facebook

With less than two weeks before we convene the Xconomy Forum on Health IT, I’m happy to report that our final arrangements have fallen into place. Lisa Suennen, a co-founder and managing member of the Psilos Group, is now officially in our lineup—which ensures that our consumer-centric discourse will be an insightful and entertaining evening. Lisa has extensive expertise in healthcare information technology and healthcare services sectors, (she also is a San Francisco Xconomist) and she writes a blog—Venture Valkyrie—that is both fun and informative.

Our forum is set for the evening of Nov. 17 at the Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical R&D Center atop Torrey Pines Mesa. (More information and online registration is available here.)

The Psilos Group, which has more than $577 million under management, is a healthcare-focused venture capital firm that believes successful healthcare innovation “must reduce cost, improve quality, and align incentives across payers, providers, and patients.”

Now there’s a novel concept! We’ll have to ask Lisa just how often those interests manage to get aligned under our current healthcare system. I also must express my gratitude, though, by noting that Lisa graciously agreed to fly in for our forum from the Psilos office in Corte Madera, CA. She is a director at several Psilos portfolio companies, including Fremont, CA-based AngioScore, Cambridge, MA-based OmniGuide, and San Diego’s PatientSafe Solutions.

I’m excited about the impressive lineup we’ve pulled together for this event, but I’m especially looking forward to a robust and provocative (dare I say even heterodoxical?) discussion about how innovations in health IT could benefit consumers. Consumerism is not a word often heard in the lexicon of healthcare payers and providers, but it should be. For example, does anyone think it’s conceivable to develop a healthcare application for consumers as compelling as Facebook?

One expert in a position to address that question is our leadoff speaker, Dr. Kevin Patrick, a preventive medicine specialist at UC San Diego and director of the Center for Wireless and Population Health Systems at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2). Dr. Patrick’s research focuses on using innovations in mobile communications, online social media, games, and other technologies to encourage

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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.