At the opening session of Spotlight: Health — the health-focused event series kickoff to the 2014 Aspen Ideas Festival — all in attendance were asked to consider: What is the one thing that we need to do by 2024 to improve the health of the world? Eleven speakers rose to the occasion, taking the stage to share their ground-breaking suggestions with the audience. Our last blog post featured the first five “big ideas” from the speakers. Below are the other six concepts to improve our health.
“What if the best ideas from the best people could be submitted online and could be collaboratively worked on in real time by designers, engineers, makers, surgeons, regulators, investors? What if these ideas could actually get to action, not be wasted? This kind of thing seems like Kickstarter meets Wikipedia meets Quirky.com for health care. It could happen.” — Myshkin Ingawale, co-founder of Biosense
“My big idea is in 10 years to create a vaccine that will eliminate the threat of influenza in the world. … What we need is a vaccine that will attack the conserved proteins on the virus, be available all year-round, used once, lasting protection, be safe, be effective, be affordable, be universally affordable.” — Harvey Fineberg, president of the Institute of Medicine
“Given that we live in a three-letter acronym world of LOL and OMG, LWL represents this… If we look at this ‘life worth living’ and use that as our lens for being more connected, we’ll definitely be healthier and more importantly, we’ll be happier.” — Neeraj Mistry, managing director of the Global Network of Neglected Tropical Diseases at the Sabin Vaccine Institute
“Next time you look at architecture, think not what architecture is, but what architecture does. And if we ask what architecture does, we can then ask what architecture can do to improve our health.” — Michael Murphy, executive director and founder of MASS Design Group
“My big idea is a secret technology that can address issues of climate change, global economy, food security, and a host of other challenges that we face in this world. It’s simply family planning.” — Jane Otai, Aspen Institute New Voices Fellow
“Imagine a world where you actually had choice in your healthcare, and there was not a bronze, silver, [or] gold plan, but a Grant plan… Imagine a world, 10 years from now, where we didn’t have three choices, but we had — in the US, at least — 315 million choices, and it was changing every single year.” — Grant Verstandig, founder and CEO of Audax Health
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