Photo Credit: HLTH.co
The inaugural 2018 HTLH Future of Healthcare forum took place in Las Vegas earlier this month with 3,500+ attendees and 375+ speakers assembled over four days starting May 5th with the HLTH Hackathon. And HealthCare Executive Group (HCEG) members and sponsor partners were there – interpreting and absorbing key takeaways, presenting as speakers and panelists in various sessions and adding their own unique support and participation at this highly touted, new healthcare conference billed by organizers as ‘The Hottest, Newest, Largest and Most Important Healthcare Event.”
HCEG was also honored to co-host a special HCEG Executive Leadership Roundtable – Leadership, Trust and Skills in Overcoming Obstacles to Radical Innovation in Healthcare – in conjunction with the International Association of Innovation Professionals (IAOIP), the Center for Healthcare Innovation (CHI) and the Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange (WEDI) and special guest, Dr. Sunnie Giles the author of “The New Science of Radical Innovation.” This three-hour roundtable took place on the last day of the forum as part of HLTH’s Association Day.
Un-Common Content with a Few Common Themes
Sessions at HLTH were organized into five tracks that varied each day. So, with 100+ sessions over four days, there were about 4 or 5 sessions covering any particular track – a reasonable and manageable number. HLTH event organizers also assigned all sessions in each track to the same room location; making it easy to navigate between tracks and sessions. There were a few crowded sessions and some rather sparsely populated sessions.
Based on an informal survey of sessions attended by HCEG members and a scan of various recaps of the HLTH Future of HealthCare forum over the past two weeks, a few common threads emerged.
Must Address Multiple Conditions, High-Cost Patients & Care Transition
Many of the sessions at the HLTH event addressed the importance of providing cost-effective services and products to three groups of people:
- People with multiple chronic conditions – particularly diabetes, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, asthma and depression.
- Patients who drive a large percentage of total health care costs
- Patients discharged from the inpatient setting.
Health Happens Outside the Exam Room & Hospital
And many of these same sessions and more than a few of the exhibitors shared information, ideas and approaches aimed at addressing these three populations by focusing on social determinants of health. Quite a few speakers and panelists spoke of the need to extend health services beyond the walls of the treatment room and out into the local community.
As noted in the recent Industry Pulse Research Survey co-authored with HCEG sponsor Change Healthcare, payers are beginning to integrate community programs and resources into their medical practices. Only 18.9% of responders said they were not currently integrating any social determinants of health, a dramatic change over the last few years.
Payment Innovation in Healthcare is Desperately Needed
Another oft-mentioned topic at the HLTH forum was value-based care and the need for payers and providers to come together on sharing not only upside risk but downside risk as well. While the rise of personalized medicine, targeted therapies, specialty pharmaceuticals and molecular diagnostics offer tremendous opportunity, payers are still growing their sea legs figuring out how to measure outcomes and associated value models – at the same time as providers and the healthcare supply-side are beginning to demonstrate outcome values in risk-based payment contracts.
What’s clear is that rapidly evolving medical technologies must be simultaneously supported by reasonable regulatory frameworks and payment model development. Hopefully, the federal government will serve as the vanguard for innovation in the area of reimbursement.
Engagement: The Most Un-Buzzworthy Word at HLTH?
In one session, the moderator quizzed the panel as to what industry buzzword they disliked most and ‘engagement’ was the clear winner (loser?) among panelists as the most over-used and unclear healthcare buzzword. The CEO of Maestro Health, Rob Butler suggested that people don’t want engagement with a medical condition but rather to be connected to their health system and support networks.
Amanda Natvidad of FitBit noted in her post titled “HLTH Recap: 6 Key Takeaways from The Future of Healthcare Event” that Kimon Angelides, founder and CEO of Vivante Health, suggested, “People with chronic conditions don’t want to be more engaged with their disease – they want to reduce the hassles and be more empowered… and technology can help in this journey.”
This very idea that People Don’t Want to Be Engaged with their Medical Condition was offered by HCEG Executive Director Ferris Taylor in a recent webinar on the 2018 HCEG Top 10.
HCEG Members & Sponsors at the HLTH Future of Healthcare Forum
More than a few of our HCEG sponsor partners were at the HLTH event – speaking in sessions, as sponsors, participating in 1:1 and small group meetings and exhibiting.
Softheon was active in several ways with sponsoring the HACK/HLTH ‘hackathon’ where participants collaborated and created meaningful solutions in competition for over $80,000 in prizes. Eugene Sayan, Softheon’s CEO also presented ‘Convergence of Health and Non-Health Data’ along with Jeff Margolis, CEO of WellTok.
Not to stop with those two events, Softheon also joined Lyft to sponsor Wyclef Jean at the JEWEL Nightclub on Tuesday. Softheon also was one of the larger exhibitors at the HLTH Future of Healthcare forum. Check out pictures of HLTH’s After-Hours Activities here.
Change in Healthcare at the HLTH Future of Healthcare Forum
Change Healthcare’s President and CEO Neil de Crescenzo keynoted Tuesday’s General Session “The Patient Experience: Making it Easier for Healthcare Providers to Make it Easier” and shared some common-sense solutions to revolutionize patient experiences, utilizing healthcare data in ways which enable providers to orchestrate and improve patient interactions – all while delivering a seamless experience aimed at improving patient loyalty and new patient attraction.
Change Healthcare was also a major sponsor, giving the first 3,000 attendees a high quality hot/cold mug and having a dominant position in the Exhibit Hall. Change HC also teamed up with Adobe and Microsoft to “Put the ‘Consumer’ in Healthcare Consumer Engagement.” enable health systems to better engage with patients. The joint solution will use Change Healthcare’s Intelligent Healthcare Network, Adobe’s Experience Cloud, and Microsoft’s Azure offering to improve customers’ healthcare experience. You can learn more about this venture here.
CareCentrix CEO John P. Driscoll was a panelist along with David Muhlestein, Chief Research Officer at Leavitt Partners on a Tuesday session titled ‘Aligning Health Policy to Health Possibility.’ This session addressed the potential for technology to transform the health industry through more innovative – and perhaps disruptive – health policy. There were a few moments of ‘extreme interaction’ between the two panelists.
HealthEdge sponsored one of the few handfuls of ‘Meeting Pods’ at the HLTH event. These small group meeting spaces along the hallways seemed like a good idea and through focused effort, HealthEdge had it pod occupied to clients and prospects during the entire HLTH event.
Announcements at HLTH2018 – Large, Small & Mostly Meaningful
One of the interesting media related events at the HLTH event was the “Make an Announcement” opportunity for all HLTH attendees. All sponsors, exhibitors, speakers or otherwise were able to make an announcement about new products, venture funds being launched, collaborations and other ‘newsworthy events’ at a pre-arranged time in a dedicated media area. Some of the major announcements included:
HCEG’s Executive Director Ferris Taylor also announced HCEG’s 30th Year Anniversary and the opening of registration for HCEG’s Annual Forum on September 12-14th in Minneapolis, MN.
Check out more announcements here.
Interesting Aspects of HLTH’s Future of Healthcare Forum
There were some interesting meeting and networking opportunities at of the HLTH Future of Healthcare event including:
Hosted Buyers Meetings – Rumor was that almost 1000 pre-arranged attendee-exhibitor buyer meetings took place over TBD days at the HLTH forum. https://hlth2018.com/hosted-buyer-program/
Funding Founders – 6 Minute, Double Opt-In VC ‘speed dating/networking session’ took place about 300 times early in the day for one hour. Based on the early morning start time and lively attendance, the Hosted Buyer and Funding Founders sessions seemed like worthwhile features of the HLTH forum.
Great Meal Service – The HLTH organizers offered a nice selection of good food, well-orchestrated for a conference of this size
Digital Content Delivery, Networking and Logistical Support at the HLTH2018 Forum
In a future post we’ll share some insight and opinion about some of the unique ways in which the HLTH Future of Healthcare Forum organizers differentiated their forum and provided extra value opportunities to attendees.
HLTH 2018 Association Day: Executive Leadership Roundtable – HCEG, CHI, IAIOP and WEDI
As noted above, HCEG was honored to join other associations in an Executive Leadership Roundtable (ELR) as part HLTH’s 2018 Association Day. The theme of the ELR was centered on leadership in healthcare innovation and complimented by author Dr. Sunnie Giles highlighting her just published book on “The New Science of Radical Innovation.” Look for a recap of the roundtable as part of HLTH’s Association Day in a following post.
Ongoing Press Coverage of the 2018 HLTH Future of Healthcare Forum
Given that it’s been a couple weeks since the HLTH Future of Healthcare forum has ended, you can imagine there are a number of other recaps like this one from The HealthCare Executive Group. Here are additional recaps of the HLTH Future of Forum currently available:
Startup Health chief on investment strategies, getting out of healthcare’s bubble
Are Federal Health Officials Fed Up with Providers’ Unwillingness to Take on Downside Risk?
At the HLTH Conference, Former CMMI Director Patrick Conway Looks Back, and Forward
Walmart’s next healthcare move: Using data to identify bad doctors
Closing Out the First-Ever HLTH Meeting in Las Vegas
HLTH & Healthcare — My tweetstorm on the HLTH conference
Readers Write: HLTH 2018 Recap: A Transformation in Talking about Healthcare Transportation
HLTH Recap: 6 Key Takeaways from The Future of Healthcare Event
DIGITAL HEALTH BRIEFING: HLTH conference roundup
More Insight and Ideas on Events for Healthcare Executives
Check back soon for more on the 2018 HLTH Future of Healthcare Forum. We’ll provide a detailed recap of the Executive Leadership Roundtable event that took place on Wednesday, May 9th.
Before the month is out, the HealthCare Executive Group will be opening up registration for our Annual Forum taking place in Minneapolis, MN on September 12 – 14th. We have a special event planned to celebrate our 30th year anniversary. If you’re a healthcare executive who can benefit from collaborating with your C-suite peers, consider becoming a HCEG member.
In the meantime, be sure to follow us on Twitter, Connect with us on LinkedIn and subscribe to our eNewsletter.
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