March 2012

TEDMED: Shaping healthcare in the world, one innovation at a time

Technology. Entertainment. Design. Aka TED. TED is the world’s most famous conference on ideas that shape the world. TED talks have been downloaded 500 million times. For the past three years, there has been a special TED focusing on medicine, and it’s called TEDMED. This year, it takes place from April 10-13 at the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts in Washington, DC.

TEDMED is a place where passionate doers and thinkers discuss and experience the power of new ideas in global medicine. It aims to answer such questions as: When will the genomic revolution arrive in clinical care? How is Silicon Valley helping to cure Alzheimer’s disease? Can aging be cured? How can your cell phone help prevent disease? What are the advances in surgical training? This year, there are two panels on obesity, and one on the link between health and what we eat. Add entertainment by dance, music and “spoken word” artists, and it becomes a magical place.

TEDMED speaking slots are by invitation only. The list of attending media is outstanding. If the future of health and medicine is important to you, and if shaping that future is something you want to do, then you belong at TEDMED.

Jay Walker is the curator of TEDMED. One of America’s best-known business inventors and entrepreneurs, Jay has founded multiple successful startup companies that today serve more than 75 million customers in 15 different industries. He is also the chairman of Walker Digital and the curator of the Walker Library of the History of Human Imagination. Jay conducted a series of interviews on Curiosity.com from Discovery. Here are few excerpts from that interview:

"How did you become involved with TEDMED?

I have absolutely no background in health care. I have no M.D. or Ph.D.  My background is in understanding problems…. Last year gave a series of talks about the history of human imagination, a passion of mine, at the TEDMED conference, and I just fell in love with it…I put together a team of people who shared my passion and my interests, many of whom had been with me for a long time. I found myself and my team with the fortunate and wonderful opportunity to take TEDMED to its next level.

Will TEDMED solve the world’s most pressing problems?

We hope that people who come to TEDMED connect, and when they connect, they go off and they solve problems. We're excited to be a resource to help people solve problems, but we ourselves are not an institution built to solve problems. We're an institution to connect, to help understand and to inspire.

What kinds of people do TEDMED conferences attract?

We are looking for the maximum diversity allowed by law. We believe that a dancer has as much to contribute as a research scientist. We believe a doctor -- we're certainly going to have our share of them -- has plenty to learn from a playwright. …A world-class architect has plenty to teach a hospital administrator and each other have things to learn... Science is a part of what we do, but just a part. We are about multidisciplinary thinking. We are about cross-pollination at very deep levels, and we are about the surprising intersection of talent and accomplishment, no matter what the field is.

How does TEDMED address conflicts between science, culture and politics?

What we are about at TEDMED is we're not above criticizing science..What TEDMED is really saying is, "We have a place in the center for what the scientific method is telling us now." We have learned that if we put the scientific process in the center, we as a society are generally better off.

How do you keep the TEDMED community engaged after the conference?

The answer is to provide a tool on the Web that allows them to engage in the understanding part of the project… TEDMED is working on childhood obesity and understanding. They've got this new thing on the Web -- which we'll name fairly soon -- and that will allow people to participate, to get themselves engaged and excited and involved, because that's going to be one of our great gifts to the world. So I suspect that is going to be our lean-forward-365 element of the TEDMED experience.

What does success mean for TEDMED?

Success for TEDMED is filling a role that nobody else in the nation or the world fills. We are successful if we fill a role and add a component, a tool, to the marketplace as a whole that adds value in ways that nobody else adds….The question is, "Can I connect people -- not just 1,200 to 2,000 people that come to TEDMED, but can I connect the people, the 10- to 20,000 people who are also watching in simulcast at TEDMED Live? Can be become an important force for connection, understanding and inspiration? If we can become an important force in the U.S., then can we become an important force in the globe?" If we do that, that's success."

If you plan to attend TEDMED, enjoy the event and let us know your story. We will incorporate your thoughts into our TEDMED recap next month.

Posted by Davida Dinerman on March 14, 2012 at 5:48 PM
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With HIMSS 2012 over, it's time to start thinking about HIMSS 2013

Although HIMSS 2012 has “left the building” and attendees have bid farewell to the excitement of Las Vegas, it’s not too early to think about next year’s show, which will take place March 3 – 7 in another fantastic city, New Orleans.  In fact, HIMSS was last hosted in “The Big Easy” back in 2007, when the city was still recuperating from the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina. 

Davida Dinerman, director in Schwartz MSL’s healthcare IT practice group, spoke with
David Collins, MHA, CPHQ, CPHIMS, FHIMSS, senior director of professional development at HIMSS, to reflect on this year’s event and get a sense for what we might expect next year at “HIMSS Changes Healthcare and the Big Easy.”

Congratulations! HIMSS had record attendance this year. Reporters are still writing wrap-up articles about the show. What were some of the big successes and events that went particularly well?

This year we launched Virtual HIMSS12. We were very pleased with the 12 simulcast sessions for the people who wanted to attend the conference but weren’t able to get there. We had 775 participants and virtual interaction between on-site attendees and those who were remote. There was quite a variety of topics and subjects across the 12 simulcasts and those who were remote were able to hear the keynotes live as well. We will repeat this formula next year at some level. We will keep it at the same number of offerings.  

Another new offering at HIMSS12 was the Knowledge Centers, providing simultaneous presentations and sit down meet the expert discussions, across six hot topic areas: 
1.    ACOs
2.    Mobile Health
3.    Medical Devices
4.    Clinical & Business Analytics/Intelligence
5.    Cloud Computing
6.    ICD-10

Knowledge Centers will continue for HIMSS13, but, again, will be re-strategized, with more information to come. The HIMSS Interoperability Showcase was larger than ever, providing real-world demonstrations of health information exchange solutions. The Intelligent Hospital was another popular attraction, again, offering real-world solutions to providing improved information at the point of care.

The HIMSS Career Services Center provided myriad resources, such as the HIT Employment and Career Guide for those seeking health IT employment or looking for opportunities to expand their career.

You lucked out with significant issues coming to the forefront just prior to the show, such as Meaningful Use 2 guidelines and ICD-10. Do you think that helped create buzz?

Absolutely. We did the best we could do with the timing on the release of these guidelines. We had to be as flexible as we could to accommodate CMS and the ONC. By law, they were unable to share information until a certain time. We had to flex with them as they revealed what was coming. Long story short, it turned out well. It provided on-site attendees a great sneak peek. Once the rules dropped, we were able to post the session recordings and get that information out to the larger audience and the industry itself.

We have a Virtual Forum coming up on March 14 on the proposed rules of Meaningful Use. It will discuss what the rules mean and what organizations and practitioners will need to know.

Which events or subject areas were popular this year and what do you anticipate for next year?

We had more pre-conference offerings than before. We had 20 total - 10 workshops and 10 symposia – which were all well attended. The clinical business intelligence workshop was packed. For FY’13, which begins in July for us, clinical business intelligence happens to be one of board’s priority areas. And the industry backed that up. People are implementing technology in that area and are looking to find out more about what they can do with it and how they and their constituents can benefit.

As part of the call for proposals, we also asked people to submit their ideas for workshops. Once we made our selections, they facilitated the development of those workshops. It worked well because people owned the topic; they were engaged and brought great expertise and passion to the table. It was a slam dunk, and we will repeat the call for workshops for HIMSS ’13.

Innovation in general will be a much larger focus for the FY ’13 and HIMSS ’13. Right now, our prime spots for innovation are healthcare x.0 and leading for the future. Those programs did reasonably well. In about a month, I can tell you more about what we’re going to do.

We look forward to that. But you gave me a good segue. The call for speakers and workshops opens on April 4 and closes on May 23. Do you have advice on what people should be offering as topics?

Good question. We are in the process of revising the topic categories, through both the Annual Conference Education Committee (ACEC) and the HIMSS Professional Development team. We plan to reduce the of 23 topic categories through consolidation. I can tell you now that there will be an emphasis on clinical business intelligence, e-connecting with consumers and Meaningful Use, to name a few. The HIMSS13 topic categories will be posted along with the Call for Participation information in early April. Also, if you are interested in exhibiting, don’t wait. People have already bought space and are still buying. To get prime spots for exhibiting and for sponsorships and collaboration, tune in now.

David, would you like to add anything else before we sign off?

HIMSS has been around for 51 years. I have been with HIMSS for seven years, although this was my first year in this role of professional development. I am seeing that HIMSS is becoming more recognized for its expertise and its ability to provide information that the industry looks for. It has taken a lot of work to shed the image that we are a vendor association only. Based on our internal score card of the number of times HIMSS is referenced by federal entities or others in the industry, we have seen the numbers trend up, which also shows that we are a resource and authority for organizations in both the public and private sector.

Posted by Davida Dinerman on March 12, 2012 at 2:27 PM
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