This year again, ECHAlliance is partnering with Personal Connected Health Alliance (see press release) for the Connected Health Conference 2018 (CHC18), which will be held on 16-19 October, at the Seaport World Trade Center in Boston (MA, USA).

The CHC18 is one of the major US-based events around Digital health, attracting every year over 2,500 delegates from across the world: companies, health professionals and scientists, policy-makers, healthcare providers, insurers, investors, etc.

In 2018, the sessions will focus on the balance between the Technology and the Human element. In an era when digital technologies enable individuals to track health statistics such as daily activity and vital signs, and new applications of artificial intelligence, social robots and vocal biomarkers are creating new opportunities for health, we are now facing the next great challenge: integrating these technologies in healthcare delivery, wellness and daily living.

ECHAlliance will organise a 1-day pre-event conference on the 17th of October (same venue), on the development of The Digital Health Society (DHS) movement and its moonshot mission in Europe for 100 million Digitally Connected EU Citizens by 2027. It will be the opportunity to discuss the actions enabling this ambitious objective, but also similar and parallel initiatives in USA, Canada, China and other parts of the world. 

In its foundation, the DHS movement is centred on citizens and consumers. The societies across the globe are mostly eager to see happening the digitisation of the health and care systems such as other services and sectors, but, at the same time, technologies need to serve the human and don’t compromise important values of health such as privacy or security. 

This series of keynotes and panel discussions will then try to build a roadmap including the following topics:

• Ethical AI and citizens data control: the promise of artificial intelligence is to deliver more personalised care, more accurate diagnostics and support medical decisions for better treatments and efficiency gains. If the technology is already supporting innovative and relevant solutions (and it still has a huge potential), it raises concern among the consumers and the policy-makers. Thus, researchers, companies, start-ups and all innovators should develop together an ethical approach around AI, including enabling citizens’ control on their personal data.
• Behaviour change: 75 to 80% of the burden on health and care system are related to chronic and long-term conditions. Beside that, Mental Health seems to be one of the main health challenge of the 21st century. In order to manage these phenomenons, interventions should target individual behaviour changes and should empower citizens to self-manage their condition and their health, changing their lifestyle and their habits around nutrition, physical activity, addictions, social relations or intellectual activities. The sessions will explore the tools and methods to enable this change, and will give some clues to achieve this challenging objective.
• Smart Healthy Cities: the majority of the populations nowadays in the world is living in a urban area. Cities are living ecosystems having both advantages to maintain a close relationship with citizens and also to be able to scale-up services thanks to digital technologies. More and more cities are developing big data approach in order to provide better services to their population. Speakers from several cities across the world will describe their strategy and tools to improve health and well-being of citizens.
• Humanise technologies: the ways humans interact with technologies have greatly improved over the past few years. Voice-control, natural language, augmented and virtual reality are completely democratising the access to new technologies and the capacity for each individual, educated or not, young or old, with disability or not, to benefit from it. We will explore several examples of these game-changing technologies in healthcare.
• Cybersecurity and Blockchain: beside the “hype” of bitcoins or other Ethereum, healthcare is already one of the main use-case for blockchain. Obviously the cybersecurity of health data is a key challenge for the sector, and it is not a surprise that several leading companies have decided to build their next solutions on the multi-ledger technology, as well as healthcare systems (as in the e-country of Estonia in Europe) have built their IT architecture on it. Our sessions will present current leaders on blockchain for healthcare and will reveal the expected next steps.

ECHAlliance invites its members and partners to propose speakers and topics for this conference. Sponsorship opportunities are also available. Please contact Julien Venne (julien@echalliance.com).

More information here

CHC18 website here

View previous edition here