Overheard at the Forbes Healthcare Summit: Four key takeaways for the year ahead

“Isn’t it funny that women’s health is an underserved category of healthcare given that women are half of the population? We’re determined to change this.” - Kate Ryder

Last week’s Forbes Healthcare Summit in NYC was not your average industry conference, with diverse speakers like former NFL wide receiver Brandon Marshall and radio personality Charlamagne Tha God. We had the pleasure of attending as the media giant convened scientists, CEOs, investors, providers, inventors, and others to discuss approaches for delivering better care, lowering costs, and improving health outcomes. Maven Founder and CEO Kate Ryder was featured on a panel on transformative tech with Glen Tullman, Founder and Executive Chairman of Livongo, and Kuldeep Singh Rajput, Founder and CEO of Biofourmis. Moderator Alex Knapp, Forbes Associate Editor, focused their conversation on the whole category of digital health including apps, AI, and machine learning, and how digital health is helping to improve access to care, manage patient data, and drive outcomes.

Among other things, Kate emphasized that she founded Maven to create an entirely new healthcare experience for women and families: “Data is at the crux of every digital product but for us, in a traditionally underserved market like women’s health, it’s about changing the entire care delivery model.”

Here are four phrases that took center stage throughout the day at the Forbes Healthcare Summit that have us most excited for the industry’s future.

1. Detect and prevent

There’s no surprise here, but leaders from many different areas of healthcare—tech, genetics, biopharma, AI, and beyond—pointed to the industry’s major focus on improving detection and prevention at the Forbes Healthcare Summit. Janice Chen, co-founder of diagnostics platform Mammoth Biosciences and Forbes 30 Under 30 alum, posed a question that really pointed to just how critical this is: “How can we expect a cure if we can’t detect, predict and prevent?” In the world of digital health, it’s great to see a shift in understanding around how tech and humans need to work hand-in-hand to detect risks, manage care, prevent emergencies, and improve overall health.

2. Address holistic needs

Many conversations throughout the day centered around the need to put patients’ holistic needs at the center of new models of healthcare delivery. There was a resounding recognition that care must address behavioral, physical, and emotional needs in order to drive outcomes and lower costs—which is at the foundation of Maven’s approach to women’s and family healthcare. One powerful conversation on breaking the stigma around mental health with media and radio personality Charlamagne Tha God is worth calling out, as he had some powerful words to share: “When you go out there and express that you’re dealing with these [mental health] issues, you give everybody else the power to tell their stories.”

“When you go out there and express that you’re dealing with these [mental health] issues, you give everybody else the power to tell their stories.” - Charlamagne Tha God

3. Empower patients

Many industry thought leaders spoke about giving patients more power and control over their own health. While it’s not earth-shattering, it still made our ears perk up. Leaders recognized that while we continue to produce new tech for managing health, we also need to create vehicles for patient education so we can use different findings or pieces of our own data to better advocate for the healthcare we need. And of course, as Kate recognized during her panel, when it comes to women’s healthcare and understanding women’s bodies more broadly, this gap in access to information and resources has historically been a barrier to improving outcomes—and changing this is core to Maven’s mission.

4. Collaborate

A lot of the dialogue at the Summit focused on data and the question of how it can be collected in a smarter way. The idea of collaborating to streamline data collection and ensure patient privacy came up quite a bit, along with the desire to facilitate better information exchanges to drive outcomes. Many leaders pointed to the need for more partnerships across the industry, especially to fill gaps in highly-specialized areas of tech and pointed to patient data as an area ripe for improvement.

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Empowering patients, addressing holistic needs, and improving outcomes is a future we can fully get behind. At Maven, we will continue to make strides in changing the entire care delivery model with women and families at the center.