Perkins Coie Convenes CXO Summit Addressing Future of Healthcare Technology

On April 7, ​​Perkins Coie's CXO Summit gathered more than 50 C-suite and board leaders for an executive leadership virtual forum addressing how technology is shaping healthcare's future amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The CXO Summit participants discussed how technology is being used to further combat COVID-19, monitor patient diagnostics, augment clinical workflows, detect fraud and data breaches, and inform effective treatments, among other key tasks and medical interventions. In his keynote remarks, Dean of the Brown University School of Public Health Ashish Jha, outlined how technology, data, and artificial intelligence can help inform and improve healthcare policy decisions. He noted the dichotomy between promoting public health and the economy was false: "We can optimize for both." He added that COVID-19 will prompt society to chart new relationships with work, data, and public health. C-suite representatives and board members from a range of Fortune 1000 companies discussed how businesses, researchers, and policymakers could find a path forward to combat complex healthcare challenges using technology and data while also addressing privacy and security risks all amid public policy challenges to COVID-19. For example, participants discussed how interoperability challenges at the beginning of the pandemic led to duplication of efforts and lessons learned for collaboration between governments and businesses moving forward, especially when speed and scale are critical in improving healthcare outcomes. Participants also heard about paradigm shifts in consumer data, including models in which data is anonymized and added to platforms to improve the public health journey for all. It's clear that healthcare technology will play a role in addressing current and future public health challenges. The CXO Summit demonstrated that investors, financial institutions, retailers, and apps can all contribute to a coordinated health response.