San Francisco 2017 Session Topics include:

Tech Philanthropy Transforming Medical Research
Following in Bill Gates’s footsteps is a new generation with tech-industry wealth that is pledging significant portions of its philanthropy to solving humankind’s most pressing health challenges. With their funding they are bringing new models of philanthropy and expectations that the medical research ecosystem is having to adapt to. Are tech philanthropists changing the rules of the game, and is that a good thing?

“Recommended for You”: Can Direct-to-Consumer Expertise Inform Precision Medicine?
Most of us appreciate the way the predictive analytics employed by companies like Amazon and Netflix seem to anticipate our needs and match us to the right solutions. Where are we in the quest to use that power in the service of developing personalized models for treating and curing disease? Can direct-to-consumer leaders help the medical community define the value proposition, engagement strategies (including building trust), infrastructure requirements and more to incentivize patients to share data and participate in research? And how can we ensure that underserved communities don’t get left on the other side of the “digital divide”?

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Medical R&D: Hope or Hype?
Applications of artificial intelligence and machine learning to health care and research have been exploding over the last year – and sometimes blowing up as we climb the learning curve. There is great hope, however, that these technologies will reduce drug discovery times and be the ultimate enabler of precision medicine. Are these computational approaches truly the expected disruption that will speed the time and lower the cost of R&D? Or will human biology ultimately outsmart our best efforts to decode it algorithmically?

What Can Tech Culture Teach Medical Research Culture?
Many of the behaviors slowing faster progress in the discovery and development of new medical products are things that organizations everywhere have been confronting for decades, if not centuries – lack of effective communication and collaboration, silo-ization of information and expertise, incentives not aligned with the collective behaviors we want to see. What can the biomedical R&D ecosystem learn from outside the space about how to change organizational culture and behavior to build a more effective, efficient enterprise? Can tech entrepreneurs reduce the time and cost of medical research? Or do they not really understand what they’re up against?

Could Blockchain Be Good for Your Health?
What does the blockchain platform, best known for enabling the bitcoin virtual currency, have to do with health? Plenty, apparently. A recent survey found that health-care and life sciences companies are deploying the decentralized database technology, which enables unchangeable data transactions, at a greater rate than any other industry. They believe it can help solve privacy, security and scalability issues related to electronic health records. In fact, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT conducted a challenge in 2016 to come up with promising applications. In the medical R&D realm, researchers are experimenting with using blockchain to improve the accuracy of and trust in clinical trials data, positing it as the platform for a patient-centric model of health data sharing and proposing that it could help solve the reproducibility crisis. Will the hope turn out to be hype?

Medicine Needs Data Scientists
Data scientists are perhaps the most highly sought after technical experts today across all sectors of the economy. After being named the “sexiest job of the 21st century” by the Harvard Business Review in 2012, data scientist jobs continued to boom, with demand across industries going through the roof and salaries well into six figures. With so many options outside of health, how can we attract the best and brightest to the fight to cure disease?

#HealthCitizenship: Creating a New Social Compact for Health
Our health is both an individual and a collective responsibility as we all bear the costs of disease and reap the benefits of healthier communities. Technology has provided new tools to enable people to easily access their health data and understand their health status, and the federal government has declared that we have a right to our electronic health records. How can individuals be empowered to control their health data and use it to improve their own health? What new opportunities do we have to support research and improve prevention and treatment? How can we create not just a culture of health but of health citizenship?