new wireless health and IT systems come together with life sciences innovation and the popularization of healthy food, fitness, and lifestyles. “San Diego probably has a more concentrated set of these resources than any other place of any size in the world,” McCray says.
Some of the barriers that the summit is intended to address are:
—Curating for outcomes. Establishing the safety and efficacy of healthcare innovation usually is slow and expensive, and delays the timely introduction of useful products. New connected healthcare tools and adaptive methods for clinical studies offer a way to break through traditional methods of validation. The speakers include Xconomist Leroy Hood, president and co-founder of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle.
—Engaging consumers to be healthy. To maintain health, people should be engaged with their own health as consumers and not just as patients.
Improving lifestyles and behavior can reduce the demand on healthcare services. Engaging consumers in new digital healthcare devices and connected health programs can help drive personal health improvements.
—Creating a sustainable healthcare system. Can innovation reduce the demand for chronic care services and solve the access and cost problems in healthcare? What are the best business models in the healthcare sector?
—Reforming healthcare policies and payments. If the fee-for-service model in healthcare is not sustainable, how should it be reformed? How should health information technologies be regulated? Can new IT tools increase the transparency of healthcare pricing and reduce the number of poor outcomes?
—Improving customer service in healthcare. With telemedicine, healthcare providers can remotely deliver clinical services at lower cost. But under traditional licensing laws, for example, a doctor licensed to practice in California cannot care for a patient outside the state. Can new business models bridge this gap between healthcare providers and their patients?
—Implementing innovative technologies. How do hospital customers think about major purchases? What are the biggest barriers to adoption and what are the pitfalls in integrating new technologies with hospital IT platforms? Top executives from Sotera Wireless, AirStrip, Skylight Healthcare Systems, Perfect Serve, Calgary Scientific, and the chief digital officer of the Scripps Translational Science Institute discuss their experiences.
If getting through such barriers seems unrealistic or even naïve, McCray says popular attitudes toward healthcare are changing in the United States—driven chiefly by increasing costs and the surprisingly high number of hospital and medical errors.
Healthcare providers and payers “are paying more attention to this because they recognize the financial model is changing,” McCray says. “When the average family’s out-of-pocket expense for healthcare is over $5,000 a year, it leads to conversations we’ve never had before.”
