What happens when you spend months immersed in the cutting edge of healthcare innovation, attending conferences that showcase everything from AI diagnostics to personalized medicine? Brandy Parker and YC Sun took us on a "Grand Tour" of recent health conferences, sharing key insights and trends they observed.
The session began with their experiences at HLTH, a major healthcare technology conference. They highlighted how IDEO leveraged a coffee area and activation space rather than a traditional booth to engage attendees, showcasing projects like the at-home Pap smear and the Willow pump. A "sizzle reel" communicated IDEO's focus on "courageous futures" and "making healthier human futures," emphasizing their work in behavioral and community health. They noted the high recognition of IDEO's brand among business school alumni at the conference, leading to valuable connections and even a project lead. IDEO also offered interactive experiences like a tarot card reading on healthcare creativity and a strategy game to spark conversations.
Next, the tour shifted to PMWC (Precision Medicine World Conference), a medical conference focused on personalized medicine and the intersection of AI and healthcare. Brandy shared insights from her talk on "why healthcare needs design," arguing that while technology, particularly AI, is rapidly advancing, human factors - usability, trust, and workflow integration - are becoming the primary limiting factors for successful product adoption. She emphasized that design, with its focus on human needs, is crucial for realizing the potential of these technologies.
Key takeaways from PMWC included discussions around the "oversensitivity" of AI in diagnostics, where AI can detect conditions too subtly for human perception, raising questions about editing AI models for convenience (e.g., for insurance companies) versus patient benefit. The rise of AI health coaches also prompted ethical considerations about agency and paternalism when AI knows more about one's health than the individual. The session also delved into the value of genomic data in personalized medicine, highlighting the complex issues of data ownership, intellectual property, and patient privacy, especially concerning data from vulnerable populations like NICU babies whose parents sign away rights to their DNA.
