Two great new speakers—one of whom will bring a major new company out of stealth mode—have just joined the lineup for Tuesday’s Healthcare Summit 2015. If you were on the fence before, you should get off it fast. If you are interested in the future of healthcare, you will not want to miss these new elements.
The summit takes place at the Broad Institute in Kendall Square on Tuesday afternoon, Nov. 17. You can find out more and get your tickets on our event site.
The new speaker we can name is Kathy McGroddy-Goetz of IBM Watson Health. She will be talking about what she calls the emerging era of cognitive computing. The first computing era, she says, was when computers were basically used as tabulating systems—counting things like the U.S. census. Then the field migrated into programmable computers: think ‘if–then–else.’ And now (and this is where Watson Health comes in) we have the cognitive era, where computers can power through vast amounts of structured and unstructured data, use context, and learn—and humans can interact with them and utilize their findings in a much more natural way.
McGroddy-Goetz says she plans to bring the power of the cognitive era home for the audience with specific examples of “patient journeys” that show what Watson is enabling right now, as well as what is on the horizon.
Our other new speaker is He-Who-Cannot-Be-Named, but only for the best of reasons: his identity is a surprise. What we can say is that he will be giving us the early, first-hand word about a major new company backed by major venture investors from Boston and beyond and coming out of stealth the morning of our event.
These two will be joining an all-star cast. Kicking off the afternoon will be a chat between scientist-entrepreneur Tillman Gerngross of Dartmouth University and Terry McGuire of Polaris Partners. Other speakers include Lynda Chin, chief innovation officer for health affairs for the University of Texas system; MIT biologist Leonard Guarente, a specialist on health and aging and co-founder of Elysium Health; Sheila Dodge from the Broad Institute; and Boston Children’s Hospital chief innovation officer John Brownstein.
The afternoon’s program will cover the hottest life science topics, from how diagnostics and data are reshaping healthcare to new models for scientific and strategic collaboration. In the center of it all, executives from three hot health IT startups—PillPack, Wellframe, and CoPatient—will explain their plans to put healthcare into consumers’ hands.
Again, you can view the agenda and get your tickets here. We promise, you will not want to miss this event. We hope to see you next Tuesday afternoon, Nov. 17.
