We’re evaluating at the most important conferences in the healthcare and pharma space and wanted to share the key issues being discussed by the industry’s top leaders.

We’re looking at conferences dedicated to healthcare like HIMSS, World Health Summit and Digital Health World Congress; health oriented conference produced by major publications like Wired Health and FT Global Pharma & Biotech;  large leadership conferences with a healthcare focus like Aspen Ideas Festival and Milken Global Congress; and dedicated pharma conferences like eyeforpharma and Euro Pharma Congress.

What we’re seeing

Several recurring themes are being addressed at many of these events.  The most prevalent include:

• The future of health
  • There is lots of discussion about how healthcare is changing in North America and Europe, and how it needs to change. Many of these discussions address the most pressing needs for patients such as including whole populations and access to rare or expensive medicines.

• Health policy issues
  • Healthcare policy cannot be separated from discussions on patient care. Countless pressing health policy issues are atop global agendas, from vaccine access, universal health care, and pandemic preparedness to health workforce shortages and climate-related disease.

• Innovation
  • Change, while often incremental, occasionally sweeps in with transformative force. From anesthesia to antibiotics, genomics to artificial intelligence, scientific breakthroughs have already up-ended health and medicine. But innovation keeps accelerating, and countless inventions on the horizon are certain to disrupt how we live, work, and play. Systems and structures are shifting, too, as the organization of medical care takes radically new forms, and public policy alters norms about who gets what, and how it is paid for. But change is a two-way street; as we shatter the frontiers of what is possible, we are being visited by the upheavals of a warming planet, demographic pressures, and growing inequities.

• Digital Health
  • From research to drugs to treatments. developing cloud platforms, data insights and joint ventures with startups are generating new suites of digital products, value-added services and cell/gene therapies. Digital technologies are enabling is to move from druggable & reactive to curable & preventative.

• • Incorporating AI into everything from new drug discovery to remote health and monitoring and consumer drug delivery technologies

• • Sharing data across disparate systems, providers, countries to see larger data sets and see bigger patterns

• Personalized medicine
  • Utilizing genomics and customized treatments to address the uniqueness of individual patients

• Improving access
  • To healthcare coverage. There are lots of discussions about broad access to good health coverage, including nations providing coverage for all its citizens.
  • To medicines. How to provide better drugs and treatments to rarer diseases that don’t support the same economic models as more broad-based diseases. For example at The Milken Global Conference last year, there was a session titled:  “Rethinking shared prosperity to reach the rare disease community”

Summary

These recurring themes demonstrate what is on the minds of the industry’s most influential thought leaders.  Top issues currently include considering the benefits of looking at broader populations, even the whole world, from a healthcare perspective, global health risks like climate change and pandemics, and the legal and social policies needed to create better outcomes across populations.

Innovation across all aspects of the industry is also an enduring theme.  From genomics and personalized medicine to digital technologies incorporating AI, remote solutions and creating broader data sets through commercial cooperation and via governmental policies.

The key issues being discussed today become the new ways of providing better healthcare tomorrow.