Blog

Eight Stanford Medicine X community members at White House

On February 25th, eight Stanford Medicine X community members were amongst the small group of thought leaders personally invited by the White House to participate in President Barack Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI) Summit. The Medicine X community was represented at the event by a diverse contingent of patients, providers, designers, technologists, and researchers, thereby exemplifying the Medicine X Everyone Included™ model. Executive Director Dr. Larry Chu, Program Executive Board members Hugo Campos and Nick Dawson, ePatients Matthew Might, Noga Leviner, Dana Lewis, and Donna Cryer, and longtime friends and presenters Howard Look and Claudia Williams were among those present.

Joined by other visionaries and leaders, including National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Francis S. Collins and the newly confirmed Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Robert Califf, the Medicine X contingent provided feedback and advice to President Obama’s Precision Medicine staff in order to foster collaboration around this important public health initiative. Stanford Medicine X has been a prominent supporter of the Precision Medicine Initiative since it was first launched in January 2015, and is honored our community continues to play an active role in shaping this important initiative.

Everyone Included™ is at the heart of Precision Medicine

During the PMI Summit, President Barack Obama joined Medicine X community member and CEO of Tidepool Howard Look onstage to contribute to the discussion about the initiative and its future. The President took a strong stance and stated that the goal of the Precision Medicine initiative is to break down some of the silos and institutional barriers that have been preventing us from making big leaps in health care. He also stated that individual patients should own their data, and that we can all work together to address privacy issues and concerns. His comments resonated deeply throughout the Medicine X community, which is built upon on the Everyone Included™ framework of co-creation and leadership. The President went on to reaffirm that the principles behind Everyone Included™ are at the heart of this initiative and essential to its success by stating that he wants “all the various players in the health care system [to be] invested in building this broader capacity” as the Precision Medicine Initiative moves forward to accomplish the goals laid out during the Summit. This commitment to Everyone Included™ was exemplified by the White House’s decision to bring a diverse group of stakeholders together under the same roof to discuss this extraordinarily exciting time in health care and figure out how we can work towards a future where, as President Obama said during his final remarks, generations will “live healthier lives in ways that we could not imagine.”

HMW include patients in research? MedX advises the White House

At the heart of the day’s Summit were intimate breakout sessions where White House staff consulted directly with the invited stakeholders on a variety of topics pertaining to the future of the Precision Medicine Initiative.

In one of the sessions, led by Claudia Williams, participants explored how we can best include patients in research. This subject is one that Claudia, who serves as the Senior Advisor for Health Innovation and Technology at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, has explored previously during a Precision Medicine design challenge held at the annual Stanford Medicine X conference in September 2015.

The design challenge, which was co-led by Executive Director of Innovation at Johns Hopkins Sibley Hospital Nick Dawson, resulted in a set of eight design principles that were co-created with an Everyone Included™ group of diverse stakeholders to guide future Precision Medicine research efforts. More information about the design principles and the additional work that has been presented and developed at Medicine X in support of President Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative can be found here, at the central reference point that we have assembled around this initiative.

The White House ensured that the discussions surrounding patient inclusion in research also touched upon the importance of building trust between the different stakeholders, and reaching out to traditionally underserved and underrepresented populations by inviting the descendants of Henrietta Lacks to attend the Summit. To us, the decision to include members of the Lacks family underscores the White House’s commitment to Everyone Included™ as a part of the Precision Medicine Initiative.

About Everyone Included™

Everyone Included™ is a framework for healthcare innovation, implementation and transformation based on principles of mutual respect and inclusivity. It is the culmination of six years of co-creation with patients, caregivers, providers, technologists, and researchers at Stanford Medicine X that has resulted in a series of design and leadership principles intended to drive collaborative healthcare innovation efforts. Our work has been field tested and iteratively improved over the past six years at our Stanford programs and convenings worldwide.