The event featured distinguished worldwide academic and industry leaders who participated in informal conversations and panel discussions about innovation and transformation in health care. The theme, “beBOLD,” captured the spirit of pioneering advancements in health care technology and “the human drive to explore, innovate, and unite in the pursuit of greater knowledge and understanding,” said BMEII Director Zahi Fayad, PhD.
“Health care is a constantly evolving field that demands adaptive scientists, clinicians, and engineers to build the infrastructure to support this evolution,” he added. “This symposium addressed the innovation reshaping the landscape and bringing ideas closer to real-world patient impact.”
More than 370 people attended the symposium, including researchers, physicians, medical students and trainees, and industry leaders inside and outside of health care. The event was held at the New York Academy of Medicine on Wednesday and Thursday, March 19-20.
Brendan Carr, MD, MA, MS, Chief Executive Officer and Professor and Kenneth L. Davis, MD, Distinguished Chair, Mount Sinai Health System, kicked off the symposium with welcome remarks. Dr. Carr explained the importance of the symposium’s theme and how it encompasses Mount Sinai’s vision and ethos. He highlighted BMEII’s multidisciplinary nature and drive to solve problems, leading to new models for delivering care. His remarks set the tone for the event, aligning the audience’s expectations and generating excitement for what lay ahead.
The symposium hosted two one-on-one discussions, with a standout moment the “Bold Discussion” between Arianna Huffington and David Rubenstein, Co-Founder and Co-Chairman of The Carlyle Group. Interviewed by Mr. Rubenstein, Ms. Huffington shared her inspiration behind creating Thrive Global, a behavior change technology focused on improving well-being and productivity. She emphasized the five scientifically-backed keys to a healthier life—sleep, food, exercise, stress management, and connection—and the power of incremental, consistent habit changes to achieve this well-roundedness.
The second discussion, titled “Bold Healthcare,” featured a conversation between Scott Gottlieb, MD, a former Commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration who is a partner at the venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates, and Whitney Casey, Partner and Co-Founder of Tally Health. It addressed the future of health care startups, their transformative potential, and the regulatory landscape shaping these emerging ventures. The perspectives of Mr. Gottlieb, a health care investor, and Ms. Casey, a long-time wellness investor, underscored the importance of investing in novel, disruptive ideas and building them into commercial products.
Both one-on-one discussions addressed the symposium’s forward-thinking theme by discussing innovative health care technologies focusing on both prevention and treatment of well-known conditions for better health outcomes.
A highlight of the four panel discussions was the panel titled “Bold Execution in AI Radiology.” This included five industry and academic leaders and addressed how AI is steering transformation and setting new standards in health care. The panelists also discussed the challenges and concerns faced by physicians when implementing AI into their workflow.
“The digitization of health care, which has been powerful for many reasons, has caused much more burden to be put on the radiologist now,” said John Paulett, BSE, an engineer at HOPPR, a firm building an AI model for medical imaging and an advisor at Rad AI. “I think what we often get is ‘how can we take some of that burden off the radiologist to let them practice what they are good at?’ It’s not the clerical work that they’re good at [or] the administrative work that they’re good at. So, we’ve approached this less from a diagnostic perspective and more from a workflow and an avenue of how we can make the radiologists focus on the interpretation of images—what they’re trained to do well.”
He and his team have revolutionized radiology reporting practices and combined technological expertise with strategic vision to build innovative natural language processing and machine learning solutions in health care.
Timothy W. Deyer, MD, MSE, Chief Medical Information Officer of East River Medical Imaging, the only practicing radiologist on the panel, echoed his concerns about AI.
“The current environment is very fragmented. We have a lot of very small solutions that do very specific things, and I can tell you it’s an absolute pain in the neck to implement sometimes. Having a more cohesive product that more seamlessly integrates into the workflow is incredibly important,” said Dr. Deyer.
Outside of the rigorous panel discussions, the symposium also included sessions geared towards building young scientists’ knowledge and networks.
The Early Career Session guided students and postdoctoral fellows through obtaining their first grant. The poster and innovation station sessions allowed attendees to hear about current research in the field of medical imaging by BMEII members and scientists from other institutes.