Designing a Patient Friendly Conference

Blog post by Colin Hung

Over the past 3 days I have been actively following the Stanford Medicine X conference (#MedX) through Twitter and via the live feed of the plenary sessions. I have never been to #MedX (I’m hoping to go next year) but from what I have seen and from what many others have said – this conference sets the standard when it comes to (a) patient involvement, (b) taking care of attendee needs and (c) meaningful presentations.

In just a few years, Larry Chu (@LarryChu), has established #MedX as THE CONFERENCE to attend for patient advocates, researchers, physicians, nurses, IT folks and of course, for patients themselves. In fact, this year’s event had the highest ratio of patient participants: 35% (picture from Janet Freeman-Daily).

At #MedX, patients are not just passive participants. Patients, REAL patients, make up a significant portion of the presentations and…