I’m excited to announce my new venture—HLTH—a new, large-scale industry event that is creating a much-needed dialogue focused on disruptive innovation occurring across the ecosystem in order to lower costs, improve quality of care and increase customer satisfaction. HLTH will be held May 6-9, 2018 at the Aria in Las Vegas.
Our ultimate mission is to be a catalyst to ignite the transformations necessary to improve healthcare. The first step to improving our healthcare industry is to imagine what it would look like for every consumer to have the access, information, tools and support that would enable them to optimize their health status throughout their entire lifespan. In that ideal scenario, we would align resources and technologies according to the varying ways that consumers seek out health information and utilize health services. Currently, however, the methods for where, how and when consumers get their health needs met are all in flux, undergoing rapid change. It is this insatiable quest to improve our current system that necessitates we take the second step, which is to modernize our administrative and operational infrastructure.
HLTH will break down existing silos by creating a forum where Provider, Payer, Employer, Pharma, Government and Startup organizations can learn about the latest advancements in healthcare that have the potential to improve outcomes, decrease costs, and reimagine our industry. By helping reshape the dialogue, HLTH serves as a catalyst for the development of the healthcare industry during a period of fundamental change.
Why Healthcare?
I have always been fascinated in how industries need to shift in times of massive disruption and how companies need to adapt in order to stay alive. That is right where healthcare is today. I have been a tech entrepreneur for nearly two decades and have built companies that helped transform financial services into the digital age, including TxVia which was acquired by Google in 2012. I was part of the team that launched Google Wallet and served as Head of Global BD for Payments and Wallet during those incredibly thrilling, early days as the financial services industry was going through profound changes. During every earnings call at the major banks, CEOs were being asked whether Google was going to disintermediate their business. There was lots of fear and confusion in the industry at large around products like Google Wallet, Apple Pay, and other new technologies transforming the industry such as AI, Machine Learning, Big Data and Mobile. Given all the shifts in the market there needed to be a forum where senior leaders across the ecosystem could come together in order to move their business forward in this new age.
The most recent industry building ventures I co-founded are Money20/20 and ShopTalk – both of which became critical to the ecosystems they served by helping companies navigate their paths forward and empowering people to work together in new ways during times of complex changes.
Healthcare needs its own forum. HLTH is my third industry-building initiative designed from the ground up around the technologies and trends that are completely reshaping how the ‘hard’ conversations take place and how actionable solutions are shared. Key to our approach is the inclusion of representatives from across the healthcare continuum that are providing tech-enabled services to drive efficiencies and better health outcomes. In attendance will be key players, including providers, employers, policy makers, disruptive startups, established vendors, and leading investors. None of the companies—whether startups or established players—bringing these disruptive innovations to market have achieved their full potential. But the implications of their business models and the relentlessness of their teams mean that they will increasingly define the future of healthcare.
I founded HLTH with Anil Aggarwal to be a multi-year journey for everyone in healthcare, to track and talk about disruptive innovation, starting with the market as it exists today. Our premise is simple: we can envision much of what the future will be by focusing on the innovators of today and following defining developments over time. We used the same strategy with Money20/20 for the evolution of payments and financial services, and with ShopTalk for the evolution of digital commerce. Both Money20/20 and ShopTalk became the world’s most important and influential events, in their respective industries. We expect the same degree of success for HLTH.
Like many startups, we’ve raised $5MM in venture capital, built an incredible team that includes former Gartner Healthcare Analyst, Constance Sjoquist, and are focused everyday on building a business that serves as a catalyst for the industry – with the ultimate goal of driving cost reductions across the healthcare ecosystem, and at the same time improving quality of care. We will uncover all of the technologies, trends and companies in healthcare – as well as those from other verticals seeking to enter healthcare – with an intellectual rigor that allows us to piece the industry together and the entire ecosystem to better understand disruptive innovations and their widespread implications.
I’m thrilled to be part of a team that has not only deep experience in all key areas but also an unmatched passion to deliver something extraordinarily valuable to the industry. We’ve been working hard in stealth for many months with an incredible external support infrastructure that’s allowed us to not only articulate an entirely new thesis for healthcare, but also confirm dozens of CEOs as speakers and put us on the path to creating a unique experience.
The inaugural HLTH event will be held May 6-9, 2018 at the Aria in Las Vegas with more than 2,000 attendees and hundreds of CEOs. Given how quickly innovation catches on, we expect HLTH to take center stage and become a stimulus for the development and growth of the ecosystem from the very first event. We welcome you to join the HLTH journey as attendees, speakers, sponsors and/or exhibitors.
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info@hlth.co
