Join the Health Tech Revolution: Get Involved in YTH Live 2014

If you’re creating amazing new tools, devices, or apps, or are finding creative ways to use or think about data to advance the health of youth, young adults, and other underserved communities, we invite you to get involved in YTH Live on April 6–8, 2014 in San Francisco.

The world of health data is exploding, with datasets opening up daily for developers and designers to work with and learn from. At the same time, there is an abundance of applications and devices giving people access to health information—through mobile phones, wearable technology, and social media—to name a few.

The crowd at the Health 2.0 2013 conference named this emerging mix of devices and applications the “Health Interface Layer” (yes, we asked and they voted!).

The health tech revolution

With nearly $2 billion of venture capital being poured in so far this year, we’re in the midst of an exciting revolution that is generating health data and information in new ways, and is creating the technologies that can make it accessible to anyone, anytime, anywhere. At Health 2.0, we’ve been looking at how new technology can change the health care system. Devices and apps are being created every day that use many types of data to help patients and health service providers make better decisions.

Youth health and wellness has been on the edge of attention in the health tech world, but that is changing fast. (Watch my presentation on big data at YTH Live 2013.) For a long time now, technology has been the primary way that youth, from teens to young adults, interact with the world around them. More than seeing technology as a means for entertainment or a tool created from a dataset, young people implicitly understand and trust technology. It permeates their lives.

At the Health 2.0 conference, Deb Levine, YTH’s founder, moderated the Sexual Health 2.0 panel showcasing youth health tech demos. Both the Teens in NYC Protection+ mobile app (Google Play and iTunes) by Allyna Steinberg of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and YTH’s Contraception App come to mind as examples of innovative uses of data to inform new apps for adolescents and young women. And there’s the MedXSafe app (iTunes), which users can use to bump phones to exchange STD screening results, by Michael Nussbaum and the MedXSafe crew.

YTH Live is a big part of the health tech revolution, bringing youth health and wellness to the forefront of health tech, and providing tech innovators, researchers, and educators in the youth health and wellness worlds with a fantastic forum. YTH Live is the connection that brings our worlds together.

Get involved in YTH Live 2014

If you’re creating amazing new tools, devices, or apps, or are finding creative ways to use or think about big or even small data to advance the health of youth, young adults, and other underserved communities, we invite you to get involved in YTH Live on April 6-8, 2014.

+Register

Matthew Holt (@boltyboy) is on the board of directors of YTH and was a keynote panelist at the YTH Live 2013 conference. Matthew is the founder of The Health Care Blog and co-founder of Health 2.0, which promotes, showcases, and catalyzes new technologies in health care.


Photo “Co-authorship network map of physicians publishing on hepatitis C (detail)” by Andy Lamb, Creative Commons

tags: sponsor, YTH board of directors, YTH Live 2014.