What To Expect At The 2019 StartUp Health Festival

Leaders, innovators, and entrepreneurs will gather in San Francisco on January 7 and 8 for the seventh annual StartUp Health Festival, held alongside the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference. The goal? To reimagine the future of healthcare.

One of the most memorable moments from last year’s StartUp Health Festival was former Vice President Joe Biden’s keynote address. Joe, Co-Chair of The Biden Cancer Initiative, discussed his complicated and circuitous experience navigating the healthcare system following his son’s brain cancer diagnosis, and what he learned along the way, both as one of the most powerful politicians and as a father eventually losing his son to brain cancer.

“I tried to find out everything I could learn about cancer. Everything I could learn about the disease he had. And I had access to literally anyone in the world as Vice President,” he said. “And what I learned was that we'd reached an inflection point. A point where science and technology began to merge in a way it hadn't before.”

This year, Dr. Jill Biden, former Second Lady of the US, and Co-Chair of The Biden Cancer Initiative alongside her husband, continues this conversation onward as one of many StartUp Health keynote speakers to look forward to. Her keynote, titled Together We Can End Cancer, will be moderated by Howard Krein, MD, PhD, StartUp Health's Chief Medical Officer.

Another keynote speaker generating buzz is Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Chief Medical Correspondent at CNN. Sanjay, a neurosurgeon who performed brain surgery five times in a desert operating room while reporting live from the Middle East, covers healthcare topics such as the opioid crisis, healthcare reform, medical marijuana, and consumer health trends. Sanjay's keynote, also moderated by Howard Krein, is titled Working with Health Transformers to Shape The Future of Health.

Oliver Wyman's New Women in Healthcare Leadership Initiative

One key theme of this year’s event will be the lack of female leadership among US healthcare organizations. Oliver Wyman will announce the inaugural Oliver Wyman Women in Healthcare Leadership Award, to be presented at this year’s StartUp Health event by Terry Stone, Managing Partner of Health & Life Sciences and Global Chair for Diversity and Inclusion at Oliver Wyman, to a leading female executive driving healthcare transformation while also creating an environment for women to thrive in leadership roles. 

This award coincides with exclusive release of Oliver Wyman’s new Women in Healthcare Leadership 2019 report at the StartUp Health event. Here, we examine through interviews with over 75 men and women in healthcare and analysis of over 3,000 C-suite executives and board members and 112 CEOs, why women – who make most healthcare buying and usage decisions and represent the greater healthcare workforce – are severely underrepresented in healthcare’s C-suite, progressing to the top much slower than their male counterparts. Our new research also identifies five unintended barriers holding both male and female leaders back and offers an executive action plan to advance progress and drive future innovation, dialogue, and change. 

Other Event Highlights:

• Keynotes including executives from Kaiser Permanente, Wellville, Novartis, the Department of Health & Human Services, LinkedIn, the Cleveland Clinic, CNBC, and many more.
• Talk of moonshots, including themes such as why we choose to go to the moon in the first place, how moonshots are redefining health, and a global vision of achieving moonshots together.
• Talk of transformation. Fireside chat topics include discussions on patient impact, data sharing, the future of health, and how technology companies consider innovation.
  
• Conversations on how wellness and lifestyle changes can reverse chronic disease.
• Health from a global vantage point, including digital health revolution in the United Kingdom, and how to achieve moonshots on an international scale.
• A closing VIP reception, presented in partnership with Oliver Wyman and RedCrow, a California-based direct investment platform for healthcare start-ups.

Follow the StartUp Health Festival from Wherever You Are

Watch a live stream of this event on startuphealth.com. And feel free to follow @OWHealthEditor and @OliverWyman on Twitter for live event updates and insights, and to learn more about tomorrow’s healthcare innovation and transformation.