Kenneth L. Davis, MD, right, in blue, leads a luncheon roundtable discussion on the future of medicine and medical care.

Clear blue skies and fresh mountain air set the stage for the 2017 Aspen Ideas Festival, which ran from Thursday, June 22, through Saturday, July 1. Presented by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic magazine, the annual festival in Aspen, Colorado, is a gathering place where thought leaders across many disciplines engage in a robust exchange of ideas.

Experts from the Mount Sinai Health System participated in discussions that offered the latest information on the future of medicine, the power of good health, today’s opioid epidemic, ways to grow a global health workforce, the intersection between climate change and health, and the aging brain. These discussions drew more than one million social media impressions. As in years past, Mount Sinai provided attendees with complimentary health screenings in its Health Concourse. Dermatologists from Mount Sinai’s Kimberly and Eric J. Waldman Department of Dermatology performed 748 free skin cancer screenings and identified 35 possible melanomas, 13 basal cell carcinomas, and 2 squamous cell carcinomas. Nurses from Mount Sinai Heart performed 571 complimentary blood pressure and cholesterol screenings.

Mount Sinai offers free health screenings to Festival participants.

At this year’s festival, Kenneth L. Davis, MD, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Mount Sinai Health System, addressed the future of medicine and provided a glimpse into next-generation health care. “Automated diagnostics are going to change medicine over the next 25 years in ways we can’t even conceptualize,” said Dr. Davis. He discussed a scenario where mobile phone apps would be used to collect personalized health data that is sent to the patient’s electronic health records. Using smart technology, this information would then generate a diagnosis and outline a treatment for the patient.

In a talk called “The Power of Good Health,” Mount Sinai experts discussed how nutrition, sleep, and the environment affect wellbeing. Valentin Fuster, MD, PhD, Director of Mount Sinai Heart and Physician-in-Chief of The Mount Sinai Hospital, said the risk factors that contribute to heart disease— high cholesterol, poor eating habits, lack of exercise, obesity, high blood pressure, smoking, and diabetes—can all be prevented or reduced with lifestyle or behavior modification. Yasmin Hurd, PhD, Director of the Addiction Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Professor of Psychiatry, Neuroscience, and Pharmacological Sciences, addressed the opioid epidemic. She explained that addiction can occur quickly because opioids “get into the brain very quickly.” Some people are so susceptible that three days of exposure is all they need to become hooked. “Genetics play an important role,” Dr. Hurd said, but more information is needed to fully understand the mechanisms behind addiction. Now that greater attention is being paid to this illness, she added, large-scale studies are under way that “will be able to give us better information about who is at risk.

Philip J. Landrigan, MD, MSc, Dean for Global Health, and Professor of Environmental Medicine, Public Health, and Pediatrics, told attendees that “clean air and safe drinking water are critical for children’s health,” along with the elimination of environmental hazards http://www.mountsinai.org/profiles/philip-j-landrigansuch as lead and pesticides. He said eating organic food can lower someone’s risk of ingesting pesticides by 90 percent. David M. Rapoport, MD, Director of the Sleep Medicine Research Program at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, said, “The average amount of sleep needed is seven to eight hours per night, but that varies a great deal.” The best way to tell if someone is getting enough sleep is to see if he or she feels rested in the morning.

Robert Wright, MD, MPH

According to Robert Wright, MD, MPH, Chair of Environmental Medicine and Public Health, and Professor of Pediatrics, the Earth’s changing climate—with more extreme droughts, flooding, rising temperatures, and air pollution—will lead to increased infections, heat stress, heart attacks, and other impacts on human health, with the most severe consequences affecting the elderly and the very young. “There is a lot about climate and health we don’t know,” Dr. Wright said. “We need better surveillance and satellite systems, and we need to start tracking the impact on health in order to make better predictions, and thereby, employ our resources more wisely, as these effects now seem inevitable.”

Samuel Gandy, MD, PhD

Prabhjot Singh, MD, PhD, Director of The Arnhold Institute for Global Health and Chair of the Department of Health System Design and Global Health, discussed how Mount Sinai is deploying machine learning and technology in its Atlas project, which combines data from satellite images with field-based insights to address health inequities in undercounted and underserved communities. The Atlas platform, being used in Guatemala and Harlem, is the “start of a journey,” he said. “It will allow us to push actionable, real-time insights to frontline workers who build trust within communities and optimize health system effectiveness.”

Samuel Gandy, MD, PhD, Director of the Center for Cognitive Health and Professor of Neurology, and Psychology, told attendees that Alzheimer’s disease research now includes the development of medication that can prevent inflammation in the brain, as well as the tangles that occur within dying nerve cells. “We are working on a cocktail of drugs and vaccines, some that prevent inflammation, some that reduce tangle formation, and some that, hopefully, arrest both inflammation and the tangle formation,” he said.