The Avatar Will See You Now: Inside Virtual Health
In the future, virtual health care won’t be a luxury for the wealthy, but a necessity as the demand for quality and timely care rises and health organizations go under more pressure to deliver better patient outcomes and reduced costs.
Already digital health avatars are making house calls and serving a critical support role, applying Siri-like conversational interfaces and sophisticated A.I. to help propel our healthcare system past hurdles like physician shortages and patients adhering to medicine.
Virtual health promises to be a revolutionary step forward, but how do we ensure that applying virtual assistant technology to healthcare still meets privacy standards and needs for quality bedside manner? How do we know applying this technology improves rather than degrades patient outcomes?
During this session, innovators at the forefront of healthcare and A.I. will discuss the future of virtual health, shedding light on current challenges as well as opportunities for the future.
Presenters
Daphne Kis
Project Dir
Markle Foundation
Daphne Kis currently serves as an advisor to the Markle Foundation’s initiative on Economic Security. She has spent many years as a strategic business consultant to young, growing companies and until recently, was CEO of SheWrites.com, an early-stage startup that is building a publishing 2.0 platform where writers maximize engagement and profit from audiences. She serves on the board of directors of Applywise, an online management tool for the college application process, and of iPerceptions, a publicly traded Canadian web analytics company where she also chairs the compensation committee. She is a managing director at Golden Seeds, an angel network that invests in women-led companies and recently co-led a $1.5 million financing round for, and now serves on the board of, Style for Hire, a national peer-to-peer network and technology platform for trained fashion stylists. On the non-profit front, Kis is a board director for Young Audiences Arts for Learning, a national affiliate network that serves more than 5 million children in nearly 7,000 schools and community centers around the country. She serves on the board’s advocacy committee and is heading its site redesign initiative.
Dr Timothy Bickmore PHD
Assoc Professor
Northeastern University College of Computer and Information Science
Dr. Bickmore is an Associate Professor in the College of Computer and Information Science at Northeastern University. The focus of his research is on the development and evaluation of computer agents that emulate face-to-face interactions between health providers and patients for use in health education and long-term health behavior change interventions, with a particular focus on the emotional and relational aspects of these interactions. Prior to Northeastern, he spent two years as an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Boston University School of Medicine. Dr. Bickmore received his Ph.D. from MIT, doing his dissertation work in the Media Lab studying emotional interactions between people and animated computer characters.
Mitch Lawrence
EVP, Sales & Mktg
Next IT
Stacey Higginbotham
Sr Writer
GigaOM
Thanks to our sponsors
Music sponsor
Interactive sponsors
