5 TEDMED talks that could interest primary care physicians

Everyone's favorite annual smorgasbord of healthcare-related thought-leader talks and power networking is set to kick off later this month in Washington, DC.

April 16 to 19, TEDMED 2013 brings together 1,800 "leading thinkers and doers" to discuss and perhaps shape the future of health and medicine.

TEDMED exists to break down silos in the healthcare world that have been built up in part by specialists going deeper and deeper into their specialties, which can prevent experts from seeing beyond their own sometimes narrow viewpoints, TEDMED Curator Jay Walker told Curiosity.com last year.

"Unfortunately, without connective tissue between those silos, we are condemning ourselves to not taking the best of thinking, to not taking the best of what we learn across all the many fields where we constantly innovate," Walker said. "We are fundamentally trapping ourselves in narrow little worlds."

Can't make it to the event? Don't worry. Many videos of TEDMED talks are later posted on the organization's Web site. Additionally, TEDMED offers an option for nonprofit groups like medical schools, teaching hospitals and government agencies to host their own "TEDMED Live" events that feature either real-time or on-demand viewing of the talks.

TEDMED's speakers and topics are generally diverse enough to hold interest for anyone from across the spectrum of health and medicine: physicians, researchers, academics, corporate executives, hospital administrators, medical students and the like.

Here are our choices for five TedMed talks that could be of interest to primary care physicians. Have your own choices? Let us know in the comments or Tweet us at @MedEconomics.

• How can we improve healthcare if doctors don't know if they do any good? Harvard economist Michael Porter discusses how to define value in healthcare and how he's promoting that definition. Porter recently authored an influential report in Health Affairs on how to overhaul primary care.

• How do we move from health data to health dialogue?Ryan Panchadsaram, a White House senior adviser and former Rock Health fellow, discusses health literacy and doctor-patient collaboration.

• Can patient data have a second life? Palliative care oncologist and Duke University professor Amy Abernethy, MD, takes a look at the intersection of big data and patient rights.

• How do we make prevention a $1 trillion business? Eighteen-year-old venture capitalist Laura Deming talks about how she found an emerging market through her work and passion aimed at extending the human "healthspan."

• Is the "obesity crisis" just a disguise for a deeper problem? Surgeon and co-founder of the Nutrition Science Initiative, Peter Attia, MD, discusses why most popular solutions to the world's obesity epidemic are "starved of evidence-based science."

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