Dr. Seun Ross 

With hundreds of attendees and more than 40 dynamic speakers, the second day of the 2024 Health Key Summit kicked off at Comcast as industry leaders, practitioners and change-makers discussed the major shifts underway in the healthcare industry and the innovations already rising.

“The best healthcare institutions in the world are right here in Philadelphia,” said Dan Hilferty, Chairman and CEO of Comcast Spectacor and Governor of the Philadelphia Flyers. As the former President and CEO of Independence Blue Cross, he emphasized the power of partnerships to “change the dynamic for the better,” a theme that was echoed in many sessions throughout the day.

David Brown, Dan Hilferty

“In the healthcare space, you’re part of something that really is a game-changer. It’s life-saving. It gives people hope for a better tomorrow, whether that’s a healthier body or a healthier mind,” Hilferty said. And as a leader, “if you understand clearly the gifts that you have and surround yourselves with complimentary skillsets and experiences, great things can happen.”

As the day’s sessions showed, great ideas, impacts and collaborations are already happening.

Throughout seven panels, two fireside chats and four 10-minute flash talks, speakers spoke candidly about what’s ahead for the industry and the responsibility of shaping the next generation of healthcare workers, equitable care delivery and technological innovations.

Here’s a glimpse of what speakers had to say:

Public/private collaboration must be prioritized to keep pace with technological innovation.

We need to be really focused on collaborative learning and open conversations, and we also need to bring our regulators along...They can’t use regulations from the 1970s to come in and survey your “hospital-at-home” that’s in my living room. That is a whole new ballgame. 

_{Dr. Sandy Gomberg, Co-Founder, Stel Life}

“There’s no place in the world where there’s a higher degree of interdependence than there is between the private sector and the government in healthcare. I realized there are amazing people on both sides, trying to solve the same problems and not sitting together and having that sort of transparent, public/private partnership conversation that you need to have. In the next 10 years, another $1 trillion will go from the government to the private sector. The private sector has to show they’re up for the task.” — Andy Slavitt, General Partner, Town Hall Ventures and Former Advisor to the Biden Administration COVID Response

Brian Tierney, Andy Slavitt

Tomorrow’s pipeline of leaders must be invited — and invested in — today.

“What we’re doing now in HHS is saying, ‘Don’t just put funds into healthcare workforce development, but [find ways to] put that pipeline in place. If we want doctors to be reflective of their communities, we have to go to those individuals and say, ‘this is an opportunity.’ I’m even thinking about starting younger and going to high schools.” — Melissa Herd, Acting Regional Director & Executive Officer. U.S. Dept. of Health & Human Services

“How do we get more physicians who look like and sound like and come from the experiences of our patients? You have to start from the ground up, and that starts with my frontline staff becoming nurses, to maybe one day becoming medical students, to maybe one day becoming a resident in our program.” — Dr. Julia DeJoseph, Senior Vice President & Chief Medical Officer, Delaware Valley Community Health

“I’m tickled to hear we’re all teaching business to the medical students and the residents. What I really find fascinating is that in this world of needing to understand data, collect and use it, where the digital delivery of care is coming right to the forefront, none of that is taught in any of the medical schools. They can’t keep up.” — Dr. Louis Levitt, Chief Medical Officer, MedVanta

Rev. Leroy Miles, Dr. Julia DeJoseph, Dr. Safiyya Shabazz

New models for care delivery, including value-based care, prioritize controlling the rising costs.

“How do you bend that cost curve without losing clinical impact? That’s what we’re looking for as we look forward over the next 10-20 years.” — Dr. Kapila Ratnam, Partner, NewSpring Capital

“Not only are quality and cost efficiency able to coexist; I would argue that they have to coexist. You can’t really do one without the other in the most enlightened view of value or quality care. The independence [of private practices] we’re trying to protect is really the physician in a model with an unburdened and direct line of sight to the patient, with no other intermediary.” — Dr. Mark Victor, CEO, Cardiology Consultants of Philadelphia

The pace of technological innovation is accelerating, thanks to capital investments and the generative AI boom. We’re all figuring out what that looks like.

“There’s a real opportunity in solving hard problems in healthcare, because folks haven’t flocked to those hard problems in the past and we haven’t previously had the capital to go chase after them. The structure, time and patience [investors] are willing to put towards hard models have differentiated major returns — you’re getting back a scalable model with a huge audience and few competitors in the space. And if you can solve the hard problems, you’re much more likely to have real impact.” — Toyin Ajayi, Co-Founder & CEO, Cityblock Health

“It’s conceivable that this very moment in time will be written about by historians as the golden age of AI. And we fundamentally believe they will write that medicine and healthcare were the industries that were most transformed by this technology. And we have the unique opportunity to influence what they will write.” — Morgan Cheatham, Vice President, Bessemer Venture Partners 

Deploying [generative AI] in an enterprise is a complex challenge. The long-term promise of the tech is absolutely still there, but we’re starting to move from the hype to ‘wow, there’s some real work to deploy this.’

_{Mike Vennera, Chief Strategy, Corporate Development & Information Officer, Independence Blue Cross}

The leaders paving the way for the future of healthcare are right here in Philadelphia.

Greg Deavens

“Healthcare remains an incredibly dynamic industry and one with endless opportunities to make it better, more equitable, more accessible, more patient-centric, and yes, more affordable. Fortunately, Philadelphia is well-positioned and well-known as a hub for innovative solutions. Many eyes are on us to see what’s new and what’s next.” — Greg Deavens, President & CEO, Independence Blue Cross