The recent 37th Annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference (JPM19) drew approximately 9,000 analysts, industry leaders, technology creators, c-suite executives, and members of the finance community to San Francisco for the largest healthcare investment symposium in the industry. Naturally, Health2047 was in attendance.
Health2047 Inc. and Health2047 Capital Partners direct their interests and activity toward innovation to shape what healthcare and medical systems should achieve by midcentury. We address system-level problems, best approached by working together with the American Medical Association (AMA), physicians, innovators and key corporate stakeholders.
Our principal strategy is to improve the interoperability of healthcare and technology, thus advancing healthcare capability via digitalization. We accomplish this through alignment with our “partner of a lifetime” — the AMA.
As the key body leading and influencing American medicine, the AMA possesses unique healthcare situational awareness. Uncorrelated to many corporate innovation roadmaps, infusing the AMA perspective into digitalization challenges brings fresh and promising collaborative ideas for future commercial opportunity. And furthermore, incorporating far greater involvement from front-line physicians is essential in driving the innovation process, allowing us to accelerate toward the goal of higher healthcare value. This fusion of medical and technological expertise is essential to success in our specific areas of focus: data liquidity, chronic care management, radical productivity enhancement, and value-based payment.
We were not surprised that JPM19 showcased a number of distinctive strategic themes and insights that corroborate the sagacity of our mission:
1. Broad awareness of the value of data
2. The enormous impact of chronic disease on American healthcare, as the U.S. adapts to aging populations and a focus on longevity expands the market
3. The power of computing speed, artificial intelligence, and decision-making guided by data visualization evidenced in NVIDIA’s presentation (the first-ever by a semiconductor company at the conference)
4. The overarching imperative for a stronger value proposition in all that we do (for example, precision medicine).
In addition to the central conference roster of presenting companies, enthusiastic investor analyses, and media amplification, JPM Week (as we call it) also features satellite early-stage company conferences, the presence of large corporate development contingents, and venture capital representation. This collectively creates a highly productive marketplace that infects participants with optimism for the year to come.
We came away invigorated. Among selected Health2047 initiatives, solving a central issue shaping the flourishing digital health environment is on deck. Our sector requires a means to identify the now nearly 700,000 healthcare apps, offerings, and minimum viable feature sets of physician and patient workflow appeal so we don’t end up with an analog to the highly disappointing farrago of the EHR industry.
Moreover, as we assemble additional corporate investor alliances that extend to include parties beyond the pure healthcare ecosystem (enterprise and consumer tech, in particular), new company formation opportunities abound. Possibilities expand when disparate parties work together to accomplish things not possible separately; wherever things that are easy for one member are hard for another, or vice versa, specific commercial openings present themselves.
We’re at work on such joint vehicle design, leveraging channels such as widespread presence in U.S. hospitals and/or varying degrees of EHR connectivity with new data rights and data access models to provide insight and action dashboards at the clinical, operational, and administrative nodes.
In addition, many leading corporations in other sectors are highly decentralized, thus suited to best engage with specific strategic healthcare applications. Examples include novel business models for: diabetes prevention programs and First Mile Care; provider data management networking and patient data management systems (PDMS) integration; AI-driven patient deterioration platforms to augment decision making and Bayesian Health; ubiquitous connectivity via Akiri/Switch health network-as-a-service platforms; and attention to new insurance initiatives focused on health disparity, population access, and profitable business models.
Following JPM19, dashboards for immediate follow-up at our firms are full to bursting. This is to be expected, as our portfolio and problem statement roadmap for 2019 address overarching conference themes — our focus is trained on data liquidity, chronic disease, productivity, and value. Fortune comes to the prepared.
Join us in 2019 as we continue to chart a brighter future in healthcare.
— Doug Given is Board Director at Health2047.
