Stanford Medicine X-Health Care and Emerging Technologies - 2012

Summary: This project supports the Stanford Medicine X Conference at the School of Medicine in September of 2012, 2013, and 2014 in Stanford, California. The Medicine X initiative explores the potential of social media and information technology (IT) to advance the practice of medicine, improve health, and empower patients to participate in their own care.

The conference focuses on innovation and the application of emerging technologies to improve health and health care from a unique patient-centered perspective. It convenes health care stakeholders, including providers, patients, technologists, academicians, researchers, and leaders in innovation. Historically, innovation emerges from researchers and providers and trickles down to patients. The organizers of this conference believe that an alternative approach places the patient at the center of discussion, and challenges health care stakeholders to solve health care issues from the patient’s viewpoint. The goal of the project is to re-engineer current research and chronic disease management processes.

Specific Aims:

• Advance understanding of how innovative technologies have the potential to improve patient care and ease the burden of disease from a patient-centered perspective, including tools to empower patients to be involved in their own care. (Ongoing)
• Provide a forum concentrated on uniting stakeholders in health care for opportunities to network and collaborate in innovative, interdisciplinary research and/or technology solutions. (Ongoing)
• Provide education in major areas relevant to emerging technology and their application to clinical medicine. (Ongoing)
• Integrate the patient voice and patient-centered design into the use of emerging technologies to improve health care. (Ongoing)
• Identify measurable outcomes most meaningful to patients and to bring researchers closer to understanding how to incorporate patient-centered design and outcomes into their research. (Ongoing)

2012 Activities: The 2012 conference was held September 28-30 on the campus of the Stanford University School of Medicine. The themes were: Emerging Technologies and the Future; The Networked Patient; mHealth and Gamification; Design Thinking; The New Scientist; and The Curators. The format of the meeting was a combination of keynote speakers, panels, and hands-on sessions. Conference videos featuring speakers and patient narratives are available at: http://medicinex.stanford.edu/videostalks. Proceedings will be published in the official open-access conference journals Public Library of Science (PLoS ONE) and the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE).

The 2013 conference will be held September 27-29.

Preliminary Impact and Findings: Over the 3 days of the Medicine X Conference, Twitter analytics revealed that conference proceedings published under the #medx hashtag reached more than 1,100,000 individuals. During that same time, the Medicine X audience tweets generated more than 24 million impressions (the total number of followers of a tweet).

The inaugural 2012 Stanford Medicine X Conference was highly successful. Qualitative and quantitative measures demonstrated that conference attendees reported strong post-conference understanding of: 1) how innovative technologies have the potential to improve patient care and ease the burden of disease from a patient-centered perspective; 2) the role of health care IT and its applications; and 3) patient potential to mold future health care.

Target Population: Adults, Men*, Pediatric*, Women*

Strategic Goal: Develop and disseminate health IT evidence and evidence-based tools to support patient-centered care, the coordination of care across transitions in care settings, and the use of electronic exchange of health information to improve quality of care.

Business Goal: Synthesis and Dissemination

* This target population is one of AHRQ’s priority populations.