Inside the 2019 Forbes Healthcare Summit

Healthcare is a $3.75 trillion dollar industry that touches every aspect of our lives. It’s also facing a number of challenges, from rising drug prices and the fragmentation of medical records to antibiotic resistance and more.

At the eighth-annual Forbes Healthcare Summit, which took place in New York City December 4-5, the brightest minds in healthcare converged to find solutions to these and other challenges facing the healthcare industry. Here, learn about key takeaways they shared on the future of healthcare for the brain, body and business.

Best Practices 

1. Eradicating the Mental Health Stigma - In an engaging discussion moderated by Dr. Mehmet Oz, media personality Charlamagne tha God, former congressman Patrick Kennedy, and NFL wide receiver Brandon Marshall discussed their own struggles with mental health and the importance of reducing the stigma around it so that people can get the help they need.
2. Replacing Antiquated Regulations with Market-Friendly Policies - Seema Verma is the administrator of Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, but she doesn’t think her office has all the answers in healthcare. “Government is not the solution, and government is often the problem,” she said. Her team spends a lot of time unraveling past policies that no longer apply to the way healthcare works today, she said.  Though Verma doesn’t always think government is the solution, she does think it can nudge the system toward more free-market principles—such as an increased emphasis on price transparency for medical treatments and drug prices.
3. Improving Patient Care with Better Data - Forty years after founding Epic, billionaire CEO Judy R. Faulkner shared a rare look inside the clinical database and healthcare software company. Considering the future of electronic health data, she predicts a Cambridge Analytica-esque challenge: the risk that family members’ data will be compromised by a members’ data authorization.
4. Saving Costs by Focusing on Primary Care - Moderator Moira Forbes joked with Sir Andrew Witty, President of UnitedHealth Group and CEO of Optum, about the mystery surrounding his company. “It is one of the biggest healthcare companies that no one knows anything about,” she said. Yet while many people may not know the inner workings of Optum, it touches millions of healthcare consumers across the U.S. What makes the company so profitable? A focus on efficiency without compromising patient care, Witty said.
5. Bring Technological Innovation to Emerging Markets - Partners in Health cofounder and Harvard Medical School professor Paul Farmer reflected on progress he made in 11 resource-poor countries the past 32 years, tackling widespread diseases like AIDS, tuberculosis, ebola and malaria. Asked what new technologies have been most critical in his mission, he emphasized that definitions of “technology” in healthcare should include vaccines, therapies and diagnostics—not just devices and gadgets.
6. Empowering Patients with AI and Telecommunications - How do you help patients make better health choices? Empower them to take control of their health with telemedicine, three digital health companies said. 

The full Forbes article can be viewed at this link.