Some of the biggest challenges in health care cannot be solved by one organization alone. Health Connect South is betting that bringing the region’s leaders into the same room can help change that.
Health Connect South will return to the Georgia Aquarium on Sept. 16 for its 13th annual gathering, bringing together health care leaders, researchers, executives and innovators from across the Southeast to discuss the challenges shaping the future of health.
Health Connect South is the largest annual healthcare gathering in the Southeast. The event will run from 7:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and include panel discussions, networking and a luncheon. This year’s programming will explore issues including brain health, health care affordability and preventive care, cancer, artificial intelligence, rural health, value-based care, digital health and the health care workforce.
The annual gathering grew out of a desire to connect Atlanta’s health organizations across disciplines. Russ Lipari, founder and CEO of Health Connect South, said the region has a “very rich density of health assets,” but those organizations historically tended to gather within their own fields.
“The opportunity was to bring them together to talk about how they [can] and do collaborate,” Lipari said.
After the first gathering, Lipari said organizers realized there was a larger appetite for that kind of connection.
“We recognized that we had tapped into something special,” he said, noting the positive response to having a broad mix of health leaders in one place.
This year’s lineup includes Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the 18th director of the National Institutes of Health, who will deliver the lunch keynote.
Dr. Erica Schwartz, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Dr. Samantha Brown-Parks, regional director of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Atlanta Region, are scheduled to participate in a fireside chat. Corwin Harper, president of Kaiser Permanente Georgia, will deliver opening remarks, alongside many other health leaders and speakers.
The day will feature discussions ranging from the future of brain health to cancer care and the role of artificial intelligence in medicine. Panels will also examine health care affordability and preventive care, funding, rural health, value-based care and the digital future of health care.
The final major discussion, “The State of Healthcare: Industry Leaders’ Perspectives: Reimagining Workforce,” will focus on the challenges facing the health care workforce. The panel will feature Jay Dennard of Northside Hospital System, Chris Franklin of LocumTenens.com, Chet Bhasin of the Georgia Board of Healthcare Workforce and Douglas Patten of the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University.
For Lipari, the workforce issue is particularly pressing as the population ages.
“We all expect someone will be there to take care of me,” Lipari said. “But that’s only going to happen if the right workforce exists in the future.”
But the gathering is designed to reach beyond individual professions and institutions.
“We’re not an industry association,” Lipari said. “We’re trying to bring together a very, very broad spectrum of the best of our health community.”
That emphasis on collaboration is also what Lipari hopes attendees carry with them after the event. He wants people to look beyond their own organizations and recognize opportunities to work with others tackling complementary problems.
“I hope they leave inspired that the work that is left to do doesn’t necessarily need to be done in a silo or alone, and probably is best if it’s not,” Lipari said.
The goal, ultimately, is bigger than one day of panels or networking. Lipari said he hopes Health Connect South helps shine a spotlight on the Southeast’s concentration of health organizations and leadership while encouraging people to look beyond their own institutions.
For a region with so many health care organizations working on different pieces of the same puzzle, the Sept. 16 gathering offers a chance to step back, look around and ask a bigger question: What could happen if more of those pieces were connected?
