IPEG 2023: Setting a Foundation for Healthcare Transformation

I recently had the pleasure of attending the IPEG annual meeting in Sorrento, Italy. The collegiality of the surgeons attending the conference was fantastic, and the views of Sorrento and the Island of Capri were stunning.

With smaller accessible markets (due to smaller patient volumes and higher incidence of rare disease), specialty areas like pediatrics have been overlooked and under-addressed by industry and health tech. Whereas a normal adult hospital network sees tens of thousands of patients annually, a normal children’s hospital cares for fewer patients, over longer periods of time. Most industry partners can’t justify R&D costs without huge revenue forecast. However, we are witnessing the AI revolution. I have been fortunate to work with some companies like Caresyntax, who view these smaller markets as important development areas for context-specific, data-informed algorithms. The apps can be developed and scaled at a fraction of the R&D cost of normal industry. As AI and machine learning come to healthcare, Caresyntax and its industry partners aim to bring practice-shaping capabilities to smaller, underserved markets. And, after a week with the IPEG team, it seems pediatrics might be the perfect starting point because of the open, collaborative nature of the specialty.