Let’s Kick the Hell Out of Healthcare One More Time!

Registration now open for What’s the Fix? 2018

When we came up with the idea for What’s the Fix? in late 2016, we had no idea if anyone would actually care or want to join us. It was a risk, but we jumped in with both feet to plan a conference and found that not only did people care, they cared enough to share the message.

With little to no idea of what to expect, the 2017 conference amassed more than 650 conference registrants – 535 of whom wanted to participate via live stream. After one day with 2,700 tweets from almost 600 people and countless post-event discussions on #WTFix, we decided to do it again in 2018.

It’s all about the stories.
It’s important to understand what we are trying to convey. This is NOT a healthcare conference. This is a Story Telling conference. The stories happen to be about healthcare experiences (since we all have our own ‘WTF’ healthcare stories!) but the stars of the show are the people out there who have battled and made change to a broken system. While conditions and diseases are often part of the story, this conference isn’t condition specific – it’s people specific.

Our new and amazing partner.
We are beyond excited about 2018 and the partnership we have with the Design Institute for Health and Dell Medical School. On May 17, 2018, we will converge on their home at The University of Texas at Austin where we will add an entirely new, but absolutely critical audience of medical students. If What’s the Fix? and its patient stories can change the way med students and the industry look at people – even just a few – the event will be a huge success.

A few changes.
Last year was amazing, not because of the numbers (we are proud of those), but from what we learned and the amazing people that we met. Part of involving the community is listening to them and our goal is total transparency. We took all the feedback we got to heart. Here are two examples:

During a Q&A session I was asked, “If this is a conference about health, and the stories of people who fought for health, many with nutrition, why are you serving pastries for breakfast?”

I was completely embarrassed. The questioner was 100% correct and that was a miss for us.

The second story comes from a question we got online that asked, “Eating whole foods is great, but I can’t afford it.” That comment has stuck with me for the past year.

So what are we doing? All the food at this year’s event will be healthy and healthful. No pastries! Only whole fresh foods that are locally sourced.

And for the affordability discussion? We are working with our caterer to potentially do a tweet chat about healthy eating, we will be producing recipe cards for everything we serve (to be distributed in the room and online) and we are trying to get an estimated price per meal for all of it.

I think those two examples show how seriously we take feedback and input, and how much community involvement means to us.

I really hope you can join us (online or in Austin) for this year’s event and you can save your spot here. We have great story tellers lined up and my hope is that it will feel like nothing you’ve attended before – and will drive you to make change and to think differently.

We are always open to questions, feedback or just chatting. Feel free to reach out to me at burt.rosen@healthsparq.com, or @burtrosen or @healthsparq on twitter.

See you in May!