What’s Next TEDMED?

One of the beauties of TEDMED is that they do a really professional job recording the event and sharing the recorded video with the world. For those who missed it or want to re-watch certain sessions, you can find the full TEDMED session recordings available online. Thanks to Xerox, I was able to cover the event in person. If you’re looking for a cliff notes version of TEDMED, check out my previous posts covering the event:

As I think back on TEDMED, I’m stuck wondering about a major healthcare group I would have loved to see on the TEDMED stage: hospital and healthcare administrators. No doubt they’re doing some really innovative things in healthcare, but yet we didn’t see any of them on stage talking about how to innovate the nuts and bolts of healthcare.

It’s not that many of these hospital and healthcare administrators weren’t at TEDMED, because they were there in force. I met with many of them and saw many of them tweeting about TEDMED like this tweet from New York Presbyterian CIO, Aurelia Boyer:

I hope that many more hospital and healthcare administrators will “Step Out” and speak at TEDMED like Hospital CIO Bill Reiger did at The Breakaway Group’s Healthcare Forum at TEDMED. It’s great that hospital and healthcare administrators are listening and learning at TEDMED, but they also have a voice that needs to be heard.

Looking forward to the next year in healthcare let me suggest three topics I hope we’ll find at TEDMED 2014:

Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) – ACOs represent the core of a rapidly changing healthcare reimbursement environment. This change will fundamentally alter healthcare as we know it. ACOs are a hard topic to package into a slick presentation, but there are stories to be told about the impact for good and bad of ACOs. We often hear: “If you’ve seen one ACO, you’ve seen…one ACO.” How about we start with one ACO TEDMED talk and expand from there?

Interoperability – Almost nothing could provide more value to healthcare than true data interoperability. There are literally hundreds and possibly thousands of people affected every day by the lack of healthcare interoperability. The challenges to interoperability are real and powerful, but I see a shifting tide where organizations are finally looking to embrace interoperability and its inherent benefits. TEDMED would be the perfect place to highlight the interoperability success stories that will inspire others to follow.

Patient Engagement – A number of sessions at TEDMED 2013 began the discussion of the shifting role of patients in healthcare. I won’t be surprised if 2014 becomes the Year of the Patient. Like a slow moving ship that’s impossible to stop, the patient is finally becoming the center of healthcare. ZDoggMD’s comment at TEDMED highlights this shift from the physician perspective, “I went in to medicine to do things for patients, not to patients.” Patients at the center of healthcare is a message that needs to be shared.

In true TEDMED form, it only seems appropriate that I also suggest a collaborative musical act that could perform at a future TEDMED. If you’ve never heard of The Piano Guys, they’re great. Where else have you seen a piano and cello collaboration perform Coldplay, Usher, and Adele? Although, their real genius is when they take two songs and mix them into one beautiful piece like they did with Love Story Meets Viva La Vida. I can think of a few areas of healthcare that could benefit from some unexpected collaboration.

What did you take away from TEDMED 2013? Have you had a change in perspective personally or professionally? What topics should we see at future TEDMED events?

You can hear more reflections from TEDMED and predictions for the future of healthcare during the May 2 at 2 p.m. ET “Xerox ‘Ask the Experts’ Episode: Looking Ahead After TEDMED” Google+ Hangout that I’m hosting and participating in. Click here for more details and to watch.

Read more coverage from TEDMED from Xerox on the Real Business at Xerox Blog and follow @XeroxHealthcare.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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