A preview of this week’s Connected Health Conference in Boston

October 10, 2018 | by
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/CHC-logo.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /]This week’s Connected Health Conference at Boston’s Seaport World Trade Center is themed around ‘Balancing Technology and the Human Element’, and over the three days of the conference the organizers will be tackling subjects such as social determinants of health, research, rapid prototyping of devices, and the very timely subject of the Apple Watch‘s ‘fall call lite’. This year day 1 on Wednesday 17 October is an ‘Immersion Day’ with separate registration (and separately priced) mini-conferences sponsored by The Society for Participatory Medicine, ECHAlliance, the VOICE Health Summit, and PCHAlliance’s ‘deep dives’ including one from Parks Associates. Days 2 and 3 on Thursday and Friday 18-19 October are fairly standard conference fare on a variety of stages and of course with a small exhibitor floor, ending after 3pm on Friday (and a good way to segue into a fall weekend in Boston).

CHC is organized by PCHAlliance, a non-profit formed by HIMSS, and incorporates the Boston conference previously organized by Partners HealthCare. Mobihealthnews offers a preview in an interview with  Senior Director of Connected Health Innovation at Partners HealthCare Kamal Jethwani, and Tufts University School of Medicine Associate Professor and Recycle Health founder Lisa Gualtieri. There is still time to register here (though hotel rooms are, as usual, scarce). (Unfortunately, Editor Donna can’t attend as she did in previous years due to other commitments.)

Late summer and early autumn event updates: Save 20% on Connected Health Summit, SEHTA Health + Space, Lilley’s talk with Ali Parsa, PATH Summit, Connected Health Conference, HealthIMPACT

August 15, 2018 | by

It’s always a little sad to realize that summer is winding down. Some (like your Editor) stretch the summer past Labor Day (the DMZ in the US) into early autumn, taking the philosophy that woolies are way too warm till November. Here are eight substantial events on your calendar to look forward to:

Connected Health Summit, 28-30 August next week, San Diego–Readers Save 20%!

Parks Associates have offered our readers 20% off registration at ‘Connected Health, Independent Living and Engaging Consumers’, the fifth Connected Health Summit organized by Parks Associates. The conference will analyze the roles of connected health technologies and innovations in driving changes in consumer behaviors and business models. Lead speakers are from IBM Watson Health, Alarm.com, Uber Health, and Qualcomm Life. More information and registration here. As a preview, download their latest white papers:  Market Snapshot – Consumer Health Attitudes and IoT Home Living Features and Sleep Tech and IoT. #CONNHealth18

Healthcare and Space Funding Call Brief, 4 September, Cocoon Networks, 4 Christopher Street, London, EC2A 2BS, 10:00 – 13:00

Sponsored by SEHTA, The Knowledge Transfer Network, and MedCity, this will cover funding opportunities for converting innovation from the space sector, from exploration to satellite communications, to new solutions for the health sector and medical applications that improve NHS treatment and care. At this event attendees will hear about them plus have the opportunity to network with organizations from both the health and space sectors. This event is part of the MedTech London programme supported by the GLA. For further information, contact Clare Ansett, Head of Communications, SEHTA

Health Chat with Ali Parsa of Babylon Health, 10 September, RSM, 1 Wimpole Street, London (new venue!)

This Health Chat conducted by Roy Lilley of nhsmanagers.net promises to be eventful. “Has the tide turned in primary care? What effect might Babylon produce? Who are the beneficiaries? What is the future for the traditional primary care GP model?” Tickets are a modest £19.95 – £39.95 and are going quickly. Sponsored by UK HealthGateway, the publishers of nhsmanagers.net. Register here.

PATH Summit, 30 September – 2 October, Omni Shoreham Hotel, Washington DC

Those of us who wondered what long-time CEO Jonathan Linkous of the American Telemedicine Association has moved on to now have their answer: CEO of PATH, the Partnership for Artificial Intelligence and Automation in Healthcare. Their first Summit will attempt to answer questions like: “Is artificial intelligence, automation, robotics and sensors the future of healthcare or a passing fad?” It will cover AI innovations, best practices, and barriers to beware (boo!) Find out more and register here, but this Editor’s advice (not that it will be taken) is to drop the silly home page quote from the buffoonish and irrelevant Mark Cuban. 

Connected Health Conference, 17-19 October, Boston

The second year of the combined PCHAlliance Connected Health Conference and the Partners Connected Health Symposium at the impressive Seaport World Trade Center kicks off with co-located conferences followed by two full days of events and expo. Preview it and register here. 

HealthIMPACT has three events from September into December:

HealthIMPACT Midwest – Rev1 Ventures, Columbus, OH, September 27

NODE.Health Evidence in Digital Medicine Roundtable – Microsoft Technology Center Boston – October 16

NODE.Health Digital Medicine Conference – Microsoft Technology Center, New York, NY – December 5-7

Counting down to the Connected Health Conference–readers save $100!

October 18, 2017 | by

Connected Health Conference
25-27 October, Seaport World Trade Center, 200 Seaport Boulevard, Boston

The eighth annual Connected Health Conference, presented by the Personal Connected Health Alliance (PCHAlliance) in partnership with Partners Connected Health, is coming up in just a few days.

Wednesday is packed with special sessions that cover the state of the market in wearables, artificial intelligence (AI), voice-activated technologies, the smart home (hosted by Parks Associates) and the innovation economy.

  • The Life Sciences and MedTech Roundtable will explore the emerging category of digital therapeutics, the evolution of traditional pharma and med tech business models and the impact on relationships with patients, providers and other stakeholders in healthcare.
  • Europe Meets North America will exchange views and strategies on issues like interoperability and the free flow of data across borders in an all-day workshop hosted by the ECHAlliance. (For more on the PCHAlliance’s EU efforts to ensure consistent regulations governing digital health with the implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), see this release.)

Recent additions to the main conference on Thursday and Friday:

  • A new fifth track focusing on health system innovation projects, outcomes and processes with the leading partnerships that are disrupting and redesigning healthcare delivery, including Healthbox and Intermountain Healthcare, Brigham Digital Innovation Hub, Johns Hopkins Medicine Technology Innovation Center and MITRE sharing their work with Dana-Farber.
  • The new Innovation Lounge will showcase provider, industry and institutional innovation centers and novel collaborations. The Innovation Lounge stage will present groundbreaking initiatives from Intel, IBM, MDRevolution and Becton Dickinson, HHS Idea Lab, data from the IPSOS Digital Doctor Survey, and results of a recent connected health survey. Dr. Joseph Kvedar will share a preview of his new book, The New Mobile Age, How Technology Will Extend the Healthspan and Optimize the Lifespan. (more…)

WLSA merger with PCHAlliance: the digital health conference scene contracts a bit more

December 12, 2016 | by

Over the weekend, the Personal Connected Health Alliance (PCHAlliance) and the Wireless-Life Sciences Alliance (WLSA) announced that the San Diego-based WLSA would be combining its operations with the PCHAlliance. This follows on the earlier announcement [TTA 21 Oct] that the Boston-based and Partners HealthCare- owned Connected Health Symposium would be folding its operation into the PCHAlliance. Both Robert B. McCray, co-founder and CEO of WLSA, and Dr Joseph Kvedar of Partners HealthCare are now Senior Advisers to the PCHAlliance, with Mr McCraw heading Thought Leadership and Dr Kvedar now Program Chair of next year’s event.

WLSA has been largely inactive on the conference scene since 2015, when it staged its last Convergence Summit in May and the Wireless Health event in October of that year. The Convergence Summit has been merged into PCHAlliance’s Connected Health Conference kicking off today near Washington, DC. The Wireless Health event will continue through a collaboration with IEEE/EMBS cooperating with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF).

In their release, PCHAlliance emphasized WLSA’s experience in research within engineering, computer science, biomedical and health disciplines. Patricia (Patty) Mechael, PhD, Executive Vice President, PCHAlliance in the release was quoted that “Their focus on medical and health research communities is a perfect compliment to our commitment to accelerate the adoption of clinical grade technology in consumer-friendly health outcomes- based business models.” Life science companies will be welcomed for membership in the PCHAlliance. PCHAlliance also includes Continua, which for well over a decade has been promoting engineering standards for device interoperability.

As this Editor looked back in October, when most of these organizations and events started about 2007-8, there were few Big Health conferences that took what was then dubbed eHealth and mHealth (later Digital Health) seriously. Now, of course, they do. There are also multiple events, large and small, expensive and popularly priced, every month in many cities–we attended and reported on #MedMo16 which will be branching out to multiple cities in 2017.

In looking back at our articles, the WLSA was engaged with the conference almost from the start, when the mHealth Summitwas one of the first ‘big name/big support’ conferences. Its tack then was governmental policy and what international NGOs were doing as a model for developed nations. It was organized by the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health, the National Institutes of Health and the mHealth Alliance up to 2012, when HIMSS took it over.

Grizzled Pioneers, and even the non-grizzled, can testify to the multiple phases in a decade up and down the Hype Curve: device-driven, mobile-driven, sensor-driven, telehealth, wearables, Big Data, population health, patient engagement, analytics, data integration, outcomes-based and a few others. This move confirms that many factors are blending: academic, engineering, software, biotech, genomics, social, behavioral, governmental–and that technology is not standalone or sitting in isolation, but is integrating and manifesting itself in all sorts of interesting places both behind the consumer scene and in policy, and to consumers on mobiles and in the home (IoT, which hasn’t resolved its multiple and obvious security problems).

Also Neil Versel in MedCityNews. TTA is a media partner of the PCHA CHC for the 8th year, starting in 2009 when it was the brand new mHealth Summit. Conference tweets on #connect2health.

Connected Health Symposium to merge with PCHAlliance conference

October 21, 2016 | by

One of the earliest conferences in healthcare tech, the Connected Health Symposium organized annually in Boston by Partners HealthCare, is merging with the Personal Connected Health Alliance (PCHAlliance)‘s Connected Health Conference to stage one conference in 2017. Joseph C. Kvedar, MD,  who is VP Connected Health at Partners HealthCare, will be a senior advisor to PCHAlliance, a featured speaker at this year’s PCHA CHC in December and will be the Program Chair for the newly combined event. To this Editor, it’s a logical move as when both of these conferences were pioneering nearly a decade ago, there were few venues beyond the traditional (and boring) Big Health meetings. Now there are multiple meetings, large and small, expensive and popularly priced, every month in many cities. In the release there is no information on when and where the joint event will be. The Symposium was in October and the 2016 PCHA CHC will be 11-14 December at the Gaylord National Harbor near Washington DC. TTA is a media partner of the PCHA CHC for the 8th year, starting in 2009 when it was the brand new mHealth Summit.