From the benefits of wearable devices for remote patient monitoring to opportunities for big-data applications to a changing regulatory environment, the Wireless Health 2014 international conference here Oct. 29 – 31 aims to disseminate the latest advances and promising prospective developments in mobile health.
Presented by the Wireless-Life Sciences Alliance (WLSA), this year's conference on the campus of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) provides a forum for airing important academic, health and industrial research while nurturing a global community that is driving the development and adoption of new technologies for improving health and lowering healthcare costs.
NIH Director Dr. Francis S. Collins is slated to deliver remarks and the agenda features keynote addresses by Dr. David Blumenthal, president of The Commonwealth Fund, a national philanthropy engaged in independent research on health and social policy issues, and Young Sohn, president and chief strategy officer of Samsung Electronics. The agenda also is packed with pre-conference workshops, panel discussions and technical presentations.
Dr. Collins oversees the work of NIH, the largest supporter of biomedical research in the world, spanning the spectrum from basic to clinical research. He is a geneticist noted for his landmark discoveries of disease genes and his leadership of the international Human Genome Project. The project culminated with the completion of a finished sequence of the human DNA instruction book in April 2003. Dr. Collins served as director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the NIH from 1993-2008. Before coming to the NIH, Dr. Collins was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the University of Michigan. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in November 2007 and the National Medal of Science in 2009.
Dr. Blumenthal's address is entitled "Bringing Health Information to Life: the Wireless Challenge." He is formerly the Samuel O. Thier Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Chief Health Information and Innovation Officer at Partners Healthcare System in Boston. From 2009 to 2011, he was national coordinator for health information technology, responsible for building an interoperable, private and secure nationwide health information system and to support the widespread, meaningful use of health IT. He succeeded in putting in place one of the largest publicly funded infrastructure investments the nation has ever made in such a short time period, in healthcare or any other field. Previously, Dr. Blumenthal was a practicing primary care physician, director of the Institute for Health Policy, and professor of medicine and health policy at Massachusetts General Hospital/Partners Healthcare System and Harvard Medical School.
Sohn's keynote is entitled "Open Innovation Accelerating Digital Health." He leads development and implementation of the strategy behind the global innovation and future technology investment agenda for Samsung Electronics' Device Solutions Group, a business that develops the fundamental, underlying technologies for a $188 billion enterprise employing more than 270,000 people in 79 countries. A technology entrepreneur, Sohn formerly was chairman at W3I; CEO of Inphi Corporation; chairman and CEO of Oak Technology; president of the semiconductor group at Agilent Technologies; president of the storage group at disc-drive maker Quantum, and spent 10 years at Intel.
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