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