Dr. Michael Blum is the Associate Vice Chancellor for Informatics and a Professor of Medicine in Cardiology at UCSF. As UCSF’s Chief Medical Information officer, Dr. Blum leads clinicians in the successful enterprise-wide deployment of Epic’s electronic health record as well as enterprise data warehousing.

Dr. Robert Wachter is Professor and Associate Chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, where he directs the 60-physician Division of Hospital Medicine. He is generally considered the “father” of the hospitalist field, the fastest growing specialty in the history of modern medicine. His new book, The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age, is a New York Times bestseller.

The Unmentionables panel, moderated by Alex Drane of Eliza, is a place for those companies whose topics simply are not often discussed in health care.  This year vulnerability, care-giving, death, sex, stress, and drinking were addressed from companies including Cigna, Altarum Institute, the Pew Research Center, UCSF, Delivering Happiness (Zappos), Hula, MD Anderson Cancer Center, and author Gabrielle Glaser.  The theme for this year’s panel was “Health is life. Care, completely. Empathy always.”

Moderator David Ewing Duncan hosted a panel of speakers including Louis-Philippe Morency from USC, Jonathan Hirsch from Syapse, Adam Gazzaley from UCSF, and Pasquale Fedele of BrainControl. Each speaker demonstrated innovative technology their workplace is developing to include forward-thinking into health care including: robotics, genomics, brain changes, and brain sensors.

Adam Gazzaley is the founding director of the Neuroscience Imaging Center at the UC San Francisco, an Associate Professor in Neurology, Physiology and Psychiatry, and Principal Investigator of a cognitive neuroscience laboratory. His laboratory studies neural mechanisms of perception, attention and memory, with an emphasis on the impact of distraction and multitasking on these abilities. He demonstrated how use uses 3D video games to test multitasking and cognitive abilities of older adults.

Elissa Epel, Associate Professor of Psychology at UCSF, examined how stress processes lead to early disease precursors, focusing on overeating, abdominal obesity, and immune cell aging, and whether interventions can reverse stress related tendencies and damage.  Research shows that different kinds of suffering can lead to shorter telomeres. She is particularly interested in innovative solutions to the stress epidemic using cultural change and mobile technology for impacting daily life and for connecting people.