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Good afternoon, Brainstorm Health Daily readers. I’ve grabbed the reins back from Sy today to share some exciting news about our upcoming FORTUNE BRAINSTORM HEALTH conference on April 21-22. As faithful readers of this newsletter know, we focus on the increasingly busy intersection between human health, medicine, business, and technology—spotlighting the entrepreneurs, thinkers, leaders, and investors who are building the brave new world of digital health.
And once a year, we gather the best and brightest of these folks for two days of candid conversation, intimate idea exchange, and inspiration. This year—for our FIFTH ANNUAL BRAINSTORM HEALTH CONFERENCE, at the Ritz-Carlton in Marina Del Rey, California—we may well have our most extraordinary lineup of speakers yet.
The theme for this year’s event is a straightforward one: Investing in Transformation. What are the most promising technologies, scientific advances, and business models to invest in, and what are the best ways to place our bets? How do we invest wisely in biology’s last frontier—the brain—so that we can at last make progress against Alzheimer’s and other neurological diseases, and better understand depression, anxiety, and consciousness itself? How do we invest smartly in human capital, in wellbeing in the workplace, in technologies from AI to blockchain and beyond? Where should we put our money to ensure that we’re building the health infrastructure we truly need in the coming decades, from reimagined hospitals to effective and affordable telemedicine? How should we invest in the unknown, so that the next generation of advances will be even more powerful than the last?
To help us explore all of these knowns and unknowns, we’ll be joined by a bevy of influential corporate chieftains (including the CEOs of Amgen, Ancestry, AT&T Business, Baxter International, Beyond Meat, Box, Cisco, GE Healthcare, Levi-Strauss, and many others); by the leaders of Google Health, the American Heart Association, the National Institute of Mental Health, Stanford University School of Medicine, and Verily; by brilliant physician-communicators and researchers like CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Stanford University’s Dr. Lloyd Minor and B.J. Fogg, Santa Fe Institute’s David Krakauer, MIT economist Dr. Andrew Lo, Harvard’s Dr. John Quackenbush, Caltech physicist Dr. Maria Spiropulu; by top investors like Sue Siegel, by sports leaders like NBA Commissioner Adam Silver; by serial entrepreneur and philanthropist Sean Parker—and that’s just a start. We’ll also, as with every year, have plenty of surprises in store.
Leading these brilliant women and men in conversation, of course, will be my two incredible BRAINSTORM HEALTH co-chairs Arianna Huffington, Founder and CEO, Thrive Global and Dr. David B. Agus, professor of medicine and engineering, and founding director and CEO of USC’s Lawrence J. Ellison Institute, Transformative Medicine. Naturally, this newsletter’s dutiful shepherd, Sy Mukherjee, and a slew of other FORTUNE editors will be there as well to moderate the discussions.
Which brings me to YOU—our longstanding community of BRAINSTORM HEALTH DAILY READERS.
By necessity, we keep these events cozy—but every year we open the conference up to a limited number of delegates from this newsletter’s loyal reader family. And we want you there this year to celebrate our fifth anniversary with us, on April 21-22 in Marina Del Rey. We want YOU there to offer ideas, to network, and to help shape the conversation about where the best investments for 21st century health might be.
To apply, please click here and click on the “Registration” tab on the left. Happy New Year.
Clifton Leaf, Editor in Chief, FORTUNE
[email protected]
@CliftonLeaf
DIGITAL HEALTH
Withings is still around, and announcing a new ECG watch. French digital health firm Withings is unveiling another smartwatch offering, this time including an electrocardiogram sensor (as is in vogue among wearable companies these days, most prominently the Apple Watch). The ECG feature is currently being reviewed by the Food and Drug Administration, according to MobiHealthNews. (MobiHealthNews)
INDICATIONS
Pharma starts the new year with price hikes. A new year, new drug price hikes. Major pharmaceutical companies including AbbVie, Pfizer, and others have raised the list prices of major medications in the first week of 2020. These price increases are a common trend among biopharma companies at the beginning of the year, when they set the floor for higher prices for their existing products. (CBS News)
THE BIG PICTURE
Repeal of Obamacare's individual mandate hasn't destabilized the market. A new report from the Kaiser Family Foundation finds that the repeal of Obamacare's individual mandate to purchase insurance (instituted under the 2017 tax law) hasn't done much to destabilize the market. In fact, the effects are relatively negligible (enrollment has only declined about 5%)—which may have implications for the ongoing lawsuit seeking to invalidate the entirety of the health law following the individual mandate's repeal. "Severability is the key word going forward." (KFF)
REQUIRED READING
Just How Safe Are Direct Listings, Really?By Polina Marinova
The 4 Main Reasons People Change Careers, by Anne Fisher
3 Guiding Principles for the Next Decade, by Alan Murray
These Books Will Help You Understand the Relationship Between Human and Machine, by Clay Chandler