ATA’s annual conference now 22-26 June–and fully virtual; announces three awards and Fellows

June 12, 2020 | by

The American Telemedicine Association has reimagined their annual conference and gone fully virtual–including an exhibit hall and poster displays. This year’s theme is “Moving at the Speed of Innovation…. Accelerating Telehealth Adoption”–if it hasn’t accelerated enough during the COVID pandemic, there’s always consolidating the gains.

Perhaps due to the complete cancellation of HIMSS and the addition of Joe Kvedar, MD, incoming ATA President, this year’s ATA has a five-day menu of healthcare leaders and over 300 speakers in 100+ sessions. Here’s a sample from the keynotes:

  • Ken Abrams, MD, Chief Medical Officer, Deloitte Consulting
  • Rachel Dunscombe, CEO, NHS Digital Academy; Tektology
  • Jesse Ehrenfeld, MD, Chair, AMA Board of Trustees
  • Thomas Goetz, Chief of Research, GoodRx
  • Jennifer Goldsack, Executive Director, Digital Medicine Society
  • Victoria Guyatt, Head of Ethnography, IPSOS
  • Joe Kvedar, MD, Professor, Harvard Medical School; Senior Advisor, Mass General Brigham (Partners HealthCare); Incoming President, the ATA
  • Ali Parsa, Founder and CEO, Babylon Health
  • Suchi Saria, Assoc. Professor, Machine Learning & Data Intensive Computing Group, Johns Hopkins University and Bayesian Health
  • Jennifer Schneider, MD, President, Livongo
  • Michelle Segar, Director, Univ. of Michigan Sport, Health and Activity Research & Policy Center
  • Jeroen Tas, Chief Innovation & Strategy Officer, Philips Healthcare

Registration is priced gently at $450. Full information, schedule, and registration here.

ATA 2020 Awards

The ATA Champion award this year is to the Veterans Health Administration, US Department of Veterans Affairs. The VA has been a leader in telehealth and store-forward technologies since, well, 2002 or so. VA Video Connect last year had 1.3 million appointments. (Sadly, your Editor’s former company, Viterion, which pioneered with VA in a RPM platform, is not currently a telehealth/RPM vendor–VA’s sole vendor is Medtronic.)

The President’s Award for the Transformation of Healthcare Delivery went to The Children’s Health Virtual Care Program at Children’s Health in Dallas. They have pioneered telemedicine programs for children.

The ATA’s Woman of the Year is  Tania S. Malik, J.D., an entrepreneur and a lawyer focused on healthcare, and specifically, telehealth solutions that facilitate online patient-provider interactions for primary care, mental health treatment, and naturopathic and integrated medicine.

Six Fellows were also named to ATA’s College of Fellows. Release.

 

Further ‘virtualization’ of industry meetings: DHACA Day, HITLAB, NAACOS, HXD, now ATA 2020 (updated)

March 18, 2020 | by

Practically all events that this Editor has noted on the calendar for the next few months have been converted to virtual events or postponed due to emergency restrictions around COVID-19. 

Close to our Editors’ hearts is DHACA Day–a must-read update. Originally set for tomorrow 18 March, it is now planned as a virtual event on Wednesday the 25th starting at 10am. Editor Charles Lowe has an update on the DHACA website in his mid-March newsletter. The tentative theme is ‘The silver lining in the COVID-19 cloud’.

  • Charles is also compiling a list of “all the products that members make and services that members provide that will help the health services and patients cope with Covid.19 and the subsequent lockdown.” There are more ‘calls for assistance’ in the newsletter for everything from ventilators to technical help at Public Health England.

HITLAB is going virtual indefinitely. Dr. Stan Kachnowski’s emailed update today notes that the Women’s Health Tech Challenge on 16 April is on as a virtual event, and virtually free. Remaining Seminar Series events will be virtual–and these extend into August. This Thursday’s (19 March) seminar will be a virtual town hall to discuss digital solutions which can help patients and physicians in the age of the coronavirus, with an international cast–panelists from Scripps Translational Institute, Ugandan Health, and more. Registration here (free).

The National Association of Accountable Care Organizations (NAACOS) has officially converted its annual meeting scheduled for 1-3 April to a virtual event, date TBD.

MAD*POW Health Experience Design Conference 2020 (HXD) 14-15 April will be fully virtual. Quite relevant is a webinar being held noon ET Wednesday 18 March on Interventions to Encourage Social Distancing, based on a 12 March survey of Italians to gauge the effectiveness of government communications on staying at home and social distancing.

UPDATE: The sole outlier up until mid-week was the American Telemedicine Association’s ATA 2020 that was going to be in Phoenix 3-5 May. It won’t be a cure for cabin fever in the sun, as ATA’s announcement of a 100 percent virtual conference is up here. Details to come.