Enabling Healthy Decisions

I’m at the World Healthcare Congress (WHCC13) in Washington DC this week.  This has always been one of the top 5 events for me to try to come to every year (admitting that there are a few like TED that I haven’t attended due to budget yet).

It’s interesting  how trends start to flow within a conference and how the trends change year to year.  This year, the key themes that I continue to hear are (in no order):

• Engagement is critical.  Between MD and Patient.  Between social network / influencers and member.  Between employee and employer.
• We have to get past the barriers to health enablement (i.e., legacy IT systems) and make change happen.
• Game theory can help improve engagement.
• Mobile tools are important.
• Data integration has to happen and employers are doing it themselves.
• Biometrics are critical path.
• We can’t solve healthcare if we don’t solve health.  The community.  Our food choices.  Work / life balance.  (I would add sleep and stress.)
• Rapid innovation.
• Reform isn’t going to be easy on the employer or the employee.

But, since Twitter is my new note taker…here’s a few sets of tweets for you.