by
Gus Iversen, Editor in Chief | April 20, 2015
From the April 2015 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
We also got the community involved. Houston is a welcoming, international community, with people primarily drawn to the city by the energy industry, but also by health, and NASA. To leverage all those assets and get the community involved, I was gratified to see people supporting what was an upstart meeting, and I was surprised that we did as well as we did last year.
I anticipate that this year will be exponentially better because we’ve learned a lot in the first year. We have several different cross-disciplinary types of people coming to the meeting, and there are a couple of other meetings being held in conjunction with MWA, which I think is a positive addition to those meetings because we allow them to share in the plenary sessions. My opinion is that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to attract the big names that we’re able to attract using MWA leverage and branding, and also with the TMC, and get the outstanding cutting-edge speakers for the plenary sessions.
They can choose to go to their own meeting or come across and talk about the ACA or the ethics of genomics or what the latest startup is doing; it will be a tremendous meeting this year.
HCBN: Is there any specific aspect of MWA 2015 that you’re particularly excited about?
RR: I think we’ve done a good job. If you go through all the sessions, I don’t know that I could pick one out over all the rest, although I’m really interested to hear about how the guy from Maine with the Google glasses has incorporated that into his everyday practice. Sue Siegel from GE will also be speaking, she has a big vision for Healthymagination, is a former Sand Hill Road venture capitalist, and is now running the investment part of GE, looking at the latest cutting-edge innovations.
HCBN: Anything else you care to mention?
RR: I’m very excited about this year’s meeting and I think in the coming years it will just continue to grow. We want to give the opportunity for people to come to Houston, see what we’re up to as far as the city goes, and highlight the incredible care and science that’s being done across our institutions, as well as the growing entrepreneurial life science community. We just opened the largest life science incubator and accelerator in the country at the medical center, and we’ve got a partnership with Johnson & Johnson labs to run our incubation as part of our innovation institute.
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