This is a post that discusses an egregious error of a seemly random pitch I received in my inbox. This one strikes close to home as planning for this year’s Medicine X is underway (I’m on the Advisory Board, remember?).

This April, the Cambridge Healthtech Institute and Bio-IT World will put on the second
annual Medical Informatics World Conference. They have an entire track devoted to “Coordinated Patient Care, Engagement, and Empowerment”.

This track will focus on “connected health, remote monitoring, personalized medicine and analytics to improve outcomes”.

Over the two days of the conference, there will be presenters and panels featuring some impressive job titles and backgrounds.

But none of the scheduled speakers are patients. None of the panelists are patients. As far as I can see, this two-day conference featuring a track dedicated to patients will not feature one patient perspective.

These are the times when I wish I had the credibility to raise a serious stink about something I believe in and have it taken seriously by the people that need to hear these types of criticisms. What’s the point of having a conference about patients and not hearing from any of them? Given the number of doctors that are presenting, surely they know one or two that are worth hearing from.