Tuesday, March 9, 2010

World Health Congress

Just got a Google Alert for LifeSpring Hospital and was pleasantly surprised to see the recent press release for the World Health Care Congress 2010:

World Health Innovation Summit to kick off 7th Annual World Health Care Congress with key insights on how innovations in the developing world can be applied to the developed world, April 11, Washington DC.

...with the byline:

Professor Muhammad Yunus joins LifeSpring Hospitals, Results for Development Institute, mHealth Alliance and DataDyne for exclusive one-day summit.

Ah what a difference a year makes! Last year I was lugging around a huge poster of LifeSpring to display at the conference and help get our name across... while few people had heard of us, we did get questions on when we would open our first hospital in the US! This year, our CEO will be speaking at one of the Innovation Summit panels, and we're highlighted next to Yunus.

But much more than that, what's most exciting about this year's Summit is the major shift in focus towards highlighting innovations from developing countries, in order to spark ideas for how these learnings can be used by the West. Last year, the conference was 99% US-focused... after all, Obama had just entered the White House and health care was a subject of huge debate.

One year later, domestic health care is still quite debatable, but there's also more of a willingness (driven perhaps by an economic imperative) to look beyond our borders and see what innovations are happening around the world. Looking forward to hearing about these agents of change.

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