Welcome to SXSW, where the world's most innovative and creative minds gather to share their perspectives over breakfast tacos and live music. With so many events to choose from, it can be challenging to navigate. We've curated a list of the top six healthcare panels that we are excited to attend, covering everything from recruiting for clinical trials to emerging trends in the FemTech industry. These panels offer valuable insights for anyone who commutes along the intersection of healthcare and technology.
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Sunday March 12th, 4:00pm-5:00pm
Covid, Mpox, Disease X, What's Next?
Austin Convention Center
Room 6AB | Platinum & Interactive
The scientific and medical communities are hyper-focused on identifying and monitoring known and emerging pathogens that pose a risk to public health – Disease X represents the unknown pathogen, as designated by the WHO, with the potential to cause a serious epidemic. This panel will discuss the lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic and the importance of pandemic preparedness through public-private partnerships.
Recruiting candidates for clinical trials is never easy, but doing so during the peak of a global pandemic, for a disease that we didn’t fully understand, presented new challenges altogether. That’s why Johns Hopkins called on The Next Practice to help accelerate their high-priority, DOD-funded,COVID-19 clinical trial recruitment during the height of the pandemic. Our strategic and data-driven approach allowed us to bring in the right candidates, ensuring equitable trial participation. We’re proud to report that the trial’s positive outcomes data was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2021.
Friday March 10th, 2:30pm-3:30pm
Clinical Trials: Innovating for Inclusion
Austin Convention Center
Room 6AB | Platinum & Interactive
Clinical trial inclusivity is a core need across the healthcare industry. While technology can connect people to life-saving trials, if you can’t access the technology, it can’t help you. This panel of health, advocacy, and tech experts will problem-solve in real-time and think of bold solutions that can help close rather than widen the race gap in clinical trials. And because dismantling racial disparities will take the work of everyone, they’ll be asking the live audience to join the discussion.
We face similar challenges with clinical trial recruitment at The Next Practice. That’s why our team developed CTRx Pathways, a tool that enables us to connect candidates to trials on their terms. We do this with personalized outreach to meet each candidate where they’re at. CTRx is a multi-channel, market-driven, disease-based media model, designed to help research institutions manage high-quality candidates from consideration to consent with our HIPPA-compliant Enrollment Tracker.
Read more about how CTRx Pathways have helped Johns Hopkins and the Department of Defense overcome insurmountable recruitment and diversity odds here.
Saturday March 11th, 2:30pm-3:30pm
Chatbots say Artificial Intelligence Could Transform Healthcare (and they should know)
Austin Convention Center
Room 5ABC | Platinum & Interactive
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the future of healthcare –at least, that’s according to intelligent chatbots that understand messages and context to generate human-like responses. Healthcare experts will join ChatGPT, serving as a “panelist,” to discuss the merit of opinions produced by AI and share their own perspectives on how health and tech companies are practically unlocking the potential impact of AI and machine learning technology to improve health for humanity. This panel will also consider the potential for AI to better support historically underrepresented communities.
Tools like ChatGPT have made it clear that AI is no longer what’s next—it’s what’s here. These tools are already unlocking new possibilities in health and tech, from how we obtain information to how we might treat each unique patient. And we are about to see how AI can help us enroll candidates and improve clinical trial outcomes. AI is what’s here, but what we do with it is what’s next.
Friday March 10th, 4:00pm-5:00pm
HealthTok: Inspiring Health & Trends #ForYou
Austin Convention Center
Room 6AB | Platinum & Interactive
Physicians are using TikTok to bust medical myths and educate on public health issues. While docs using social media isn’t anything new, their ability to make relatable videos and educate a broader community in real-time is. Healthcare professionals have created a shift in how we learn about our health and connect globally with experts. This panel will share how #HealthTok is making a difference.
TikTok has become the world’s fastest-growing platform, with over one-billion self-reported active monthly users. According to Sensor Tower’s latest report, users spend an average of over 1 hour and 35 minutes per day viewing its sound-on, short-form videos. In 2023,TikTok is focused on inspiring users to test new products and ways of thinking and behaving through “actionable entertainment”— a notion of off-platform action-taking.
This platform can be a tool for healthcare professionals and brands to reach and engage with a community in an extended, and potentially entertaining, way. This approach can lead to better recall, more effective information retention, and ultimately a better user experience than we have seen to date. If you're interested in what’s next in the future of healthcare, then this topic is #ForYou.
Friday March 10th, 11:30am-1:30pm
Flourishing $1T FemTech Industry
Austin Convention Center
Room 6AB | Platinum & Interactive
This panel will discuss the thriving $1 Trillion FemTech industry including the solutions and market opportunities that are bringing innovation and care to all women globally. They will touch on the thoughtful, holistic innovations that FemTech entrepreneurs and scientists are creating including HR and data privacy tools, post-abortion support digital health app tools, culturally sensitive provider ratings and discovery tools for Black women and women of color and Telehealth abortion tools.
To ensure that healthcare products and services are safe and effective for all patients, it is crucial to prioritize equity during clinical trial enrollment. Historically, we have failed to represent large populations of people in our clinical trials, leading to gaps in knowledge about the safety and effectiveness of treatments. This panel will highlight some examples of how we are already helping to improve healthcare outcomes for women worldwide and explore ways to further promote clinical diversity in healthcare research and development. By prioritizing clinical diversity, we can be sure that our treatment works for everyone.
Monday March 13th, 10:00am-11:00am
Breaking Binary: Ending Inequity in Intersex Care
Austin Convention Center
Room 5ABC | Platinum & Interactive
Intersex people comprise nearly 2% of the world's population but exist largely in the shadows—marginalized by society and physically conformed to fit an M or F box via surgeries and hormones, often without their consent. While politics have shined a spotlight on transgender health, few recognize that the same legislation banning care for trans kids has massive implications for intersex youth too. This panel of physicians and advocates with lived experience will tackle healthcare inequities intersex people face and explore how the medical community can and must do better.
This panel will share how non-consensual surgeries, hormone treatment, and sterilization causes physical and psychological harm, and they will shed light on potential solutions that go beyond simply increasing research, adding new trainings, or informing patients. Ensuring that everyone receives proper care is a challenge that is bigger than any of us, and it will take an effort from all of us to overcome it.
(Background: According to Planned Parenthood, intersex is a general term for a variety of conditions where a person is born with reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn’t fit typical definitions of male or female bodies)
