Wireless Health Summit Showcases Incentive Prizes as Tool for Change

About 275 technologists and healthcare industry executives are gathering in downtown San Diego tomorrow as the Wireless-Life Sciences Alliance (WLSA) convenes its Seventh Annual Convergence Summit at the Grand Hyatt.

“The overarching theme of the summit this year is ‘How do we move from innovation to institutional and personal adoption of the tools and technologies for wireless health?’” says WLSA CEO Rob McCray. Tomorrow’s agenda consists of all closed-door sessions for WLSA members, while McCray says the agenda for Wednesday and Thursday, which has no restrictions but is nearly sold out, puts an emphasis on the imperative for adopting technology innovations that meet healthcare needs and help to reduce costs.

In Wednesday’s opening session, for example, McCray says Leslie Saxon of the USC Keck School of Medicine is highlighting some of the practical aspects in determining who pays as institutional customers adopt wireless healthcare innovations. David Sayen, regional administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid in Californa, Arizona, Nevada, Hawaii, and other Pacific islands, will talk about using innovation to wring more care from existing programs.

The 2012 summit also may go down as the year of incentive prizes in wireless health.

The parade of prizes begins Wednesday with the selection of a winner from three finalists named in early April as part of Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen Connected Care Challenge, a competition that was created to help bridge the gap in coordinating patient care among different healthcare practices. Each of the finalists received $50,000 to help advance their

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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.