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sort of built the program around. And I think also what we’re very good at as an organization is being able to take very complex industry structures and syn- thesize them and summarize them into a sort of one-stop-shop approach.
Atlantic/Polloway This is the fifth year that we did the program, and we always challenge ourselves to make sure the content is fresh, that we are bringing a new debate to the table, that we are engaging new voices, as opposed to continuing the same dialogue. There are threads and themes that are going to weave in and we’re going to want to parallel on year over year. But we certainly wouldn’t be doing our job well if we were just repeating the previous year’s conversation.
PROGRAM: STRENGTH VS. SURPRISE Economist/Cox This is where The Econ- omist really sort of plays to its strength. We write a lot about health care, par- ticularly around the interface between health-care policy and the provision of health-care services, so this really plays to our strength. We see health care as one of the big strategic industries [that] we are looking at. We have made some acquisitions of health-care information companies over the course of the last couple of years, and so we will be work- ing with them on this event, too. It’s going to be a broad-reaching program, and we will be looking at areas such as payment reform. We’ll be looking at this whole new area of [private health- insurance] exchanges, which is clearly a big issue and something [that] I know a lot of organizations are looking at.
Atlantic/Smalley It’s creating a program that is compelling and has a mix of voices talking about wonky issues, like how the Affordable Care Act might change the health-care landscape, but also talking about new technologies and interesting ideas and individual innova- tors in the health-care field. I have a
68 PCMA CONVENE OCTOBER 2013
‘We always challenge ourselves to make sure the content is fresh. We certainly wouldn’t be doing our jobs well if we were just repeating the previous year’s conversation.’
large staff working with me on content. We do a lot of research on what the major issues of the day are — what we think will prove valuable and interest- ing and substantive to an audience of top D.C. policy makers and other stake- holders in the health-care conversation. But then, we also look into things
that haven’t been talked about as much, that might be new information or just give people access to an up-and-coming talent. I’m thinking, not at this year’s forum, but the prior year, where we had the CEO of PatientsLikeMe, which a lot of people in Washington hadn’t heard of. It turns out this guy has a great story, a really inspiring story. His brother died of Lou Gehrig’s disease [amyo- trophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)], and he started a company that aggregates patient records and patient informa- tion. It’s totally voluntary, obviously, but for a disease that rare, it can be an incredible thing for patients to be able to unite via the web with every other patient out there who has ALS. They’re mining these records for patterns to see what they might be able to find in terms of commonalities and how that might inform ALS research. Bringing
‘Care for the Whole Person’ at the Atlantic Health Care Forum.
him down from Boston, which is where he’s based, was of great interest to a lot of the D.C. health establishment, who mainly had heard about him in passing or read about PatientsLikeMe, like I had. But to have him on stage, giving a 45-minute presentation about his work, was really wonderful.
SPEAKERS: EVIDENCE-BASED VS. INSIDE-WASHINGTON Economist/Cox We have Ralph de la Torre from Steward Health Care Sys- tem talking about payment reform. And then, particularly, the area where we can bring our global expertise to play is the space around evidence-based medi- cine. We have a company which we own in the U.K. called Bazian, and Bazian does a lot of work for the National Health Service in terms of looking at this whole area of evidence-based medicine, or perhaps better called value-based medicine, and so we’re going to be bringing somebody over from Bazian to talk about that, because this is obviously quite a political issue here in the U.S. How far do you go with treating people, and how much does it cost to treat people?