Conference Insights: 2019 Yale Healthcare Conference

The Yale Healthcare Conference is a joint effort between Yale SOM and the health professional schools at Yale. It brings together professionals, scholars, and students for discussions aimed at identifying solutions to contemporary health are issues. This year’s theme was “Reimagining Healthcare: Changing Perspectives on Delivery & Disparities.”

Here are my main takeaways:

• When organizing a conference, you need diverse perspectives. Our student executive team, responsible for all planning of the conference, had representatives from Yale SOM, Yale School of Public Health, and the Yale School of Nursing (across multiple programs at each school). It was a huge benefit to have conference planners from different backgrounds, as this made it much easier to develop content for and include perspectives from many aspects of healthcare, including administration, providers, policy makers, and others.
• There is a benefit to having Yale Alumni on our board. We have a 14-person advisory board, which includes many former Yale grads (from many schools at SOM) and Yale faculty and staff. These advisory board members are leaders in their fields of healthcare and were an invaluable resource during the conference planning process.
• Taking care of patients requires taking care of the full patient. Our morning keynote speaker, Dr. Vivek Garg, chief medical officer at CareMore Health, spoke about the CareMore model and how good health outcomes require meeting the patient where they’re at, physically and otherwise, going to their homes and working with them on lifestyle changes, not just medicine—getting to know them as full people. Sometimes, more care can be better and more efficient care. (See here for more info.)
• The face of medicine is changing. Our evening keynote, Dr. Vivian Pinn, spoke honestly about her experience in medicine—what drew her to medical school in the first place, and how she reached many impressive positions, including as the founding director of the Office of Research on Women’s Health at the NIH. She also spoke about how the field of medicine has changed in terms of representation since she began, but there are still barriers that have yet to be crossed.