There is space for more than one health/technology conference in the Twin Cities this fall. The Carlson School of Management's Medical Industry Leadership Institute (MILI) is hosting the inaugural CONVENE Conference at the University of Minnesota on October 3.
It's a one-day conference that will bring together academics and medical industry folks to focus on the core components of data science and analytics within the medical and health care industries.
Pinar Karaca-Mandic has been working to organize the conference since she was named the Academic Director of MILI last October. She has organized a full day conference that includes a mix of academic and industry presenters.
"Industry need to talk to academia," Karaca-Mandic said. "And academia needs to talk to industry."
The conference will include academic presentations that represent different disciplines throughout the University of Minnesota ecosystem and the keynote speaker of the event will be John Hammergren, chairman, president and chief executive of McKesson Corp.
Karaca-Mandic expects the CONVENE conference to draw 250 to 300 attendees, with half the attendees coming from various industries and half coming from the faculty and students at the University of Minnesota.
The other new conference this fall, the MANOVA Global Summit, is focused on the consumerization of health and medical delivery through technology. It is a more ambitious event that has a global focus and will occur over four days, Oct. 8-11th, and hopes to draw as many as 2,000 attendees.
Dr. Archelle Georgiou an industry advisor to MILI will be a moderator at both conferences. She says a focus of the CONVENE Conference will be the "tension between human and artificial intelligence."
According to Georgiou artificial intelligence can lead to things like individualized medicine but there still needs to be plenty of human intelligence to realize the full potential of the traditional and un-traditional healthcare data sets.
Karaca-Mandic sees the Convene and Manova conferences as complementary and that they speak to different audiences. She has spoken with the organizers of the Manova conference expects there will be collaboration between the two events in future years.
"We have been sharing information between the Convene Conference and Manova Summit during the planning process for each event," said Kathy Tunheim, CEO of Tunheim and Partner of 2023 Partners which is the presenting partner of the Manova conference. "Each has a unique focus and audience target, but we are all open to the idea that collaboration between the two might very well grow in future years."
"We hope this is something we can do every year," Karaca-Mandic said.
