TEDMED’s ambitious project is not looking for solutions, but a better conversation with people from inside and outside healthcare. Much like President Obama’s call to citizenship in his convention speech, the organization is asking for us to join an informed and constructive discussion:
… we propose to provide America and the world with an unbiased and broadly inclusive view of these challenges, incorporating thoughtful, multidisciplinary perspectives. We seek thoughtful views from doctors, scientists and researchers, of course — but also from technology innovators, business and government leaders, patients, legal experts, representatives of the armed forces, the media, and many more.
The organization is starting with these six topics from a list of 20:
The Power of Real World Data to Study Women’s Health at Scale
Veradigm examines key clinical trends, comorbidity profiles, and treatment trends across adolescence, reproductive years, and peri-/post-menopause. Download it today!
- The Role of the Patient
- Managing Chronic Disease
- The Obesity Crisis
- The Caregiver Crisis
- Eliminating Medical Errors
- Achieving Medical Innovation
Each challenge has a team and a plan to get the conversation started on the TEDMED site and in Twitter chats. Team members across the six challenges include Don Rucker, vice president and chief medical officer, Siemens; Ruth Rechis-Oelker, Ph.D., director of Evaluation & Research, Livestrong; Maya Rockeymoore Ph.D., president and CEO, Global Policy Solutions; Ted Eytan, director, The Permanente Federation, LLC at Kaiser Permanente; and Halle Tecco, CEO, RockHealth.
You can submit questions to the team on the Discuss tab of each challenge. Team members will respond on the Explore section of each challenge. There is already a lot of activity on the #GreatChallenges hashtag on Twitter.
There are startups around the country addressing some of these problems:
The Hidden Administrative Tasks Draining Small Practices
Small practices play a critical role in healthcare delivery, but they cannot continue to absorb ever-increasing administrative demands without consequences.
Medical errors
S.E.A. Medical
Carex
Obesity
Allurion Technologies
LoseIt!
Vibrynt
Managing chronic conditions
Podimetrics
WellDoc