For more than 13 years, Georgia Bio has organized and hosted Georgia’s premier bioscience and medtech conference. The Georgia Bio Innovation Summit welcomed over 600 CEOs, senior executives, scientists, and public policy officials from Georgia and across the nation to learn about exciting opportunities in Georgia, discuss current topics impacting the industry, and commiserate. The 2015 edition of the Summit took place on Monday, November 2nd at the Cobb Galleria, and the enthusiasm and excitement surrounding the Georgia life sciences community was electric in spite of the rainy weather. This year’s Summit had a decidedly “data” focus as both keynote addresses focused on harnessing big data in the healthcare sector and it’s potential to impact our industries.
Emory and the OTT staff had the opportunity to participate, with our team representing the university in the exhibit hall, and a number of our startup companies presenting during the Georgia Bioscience Co. Showcase. This included Emory Startups, Metaclipse Therapeutics, Microbial Medical, Cambium Medical Technologies, and Accuitis (for more info on Emory startup companies see here).
Since a number of our OTTers were in attendance, we’ve crowdsourced a number of takeaways and snippets to share for those who may not have had the chance to attend:
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The technology is there and we can make a lot of cutting-edge technology but the difficulty is getting through all the regulations and policies in order to implement the technology.
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“Interoperability” is the next big issue and concern for healthcare IT and EMR systems
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Emory startups and inventors are strong in the biotech ecosystem in Georgia. We saw presentations from a number of Emory-based startups and poster presentations from inventors like Cassandra Quave, Kerry Ressler, and Raymond Schinazi.
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The sessions on reimbursement strategies were extremely insightful. Given that the technologies OTT manages are generally so early stage, when a product is just a glimmer in the inventor’s eye, it is easy to forget the later stage challenges involved in making the “business opportunity” for a new product viable, such as having a sound strategy for receiving reimbursement from payers (both public and private).
We look forward to next year’s summit.