One of the biggest issues of health policy today is how to manage the explosion of digital technologies that are infiltrating, networking and dramatically changing and rapidly enveloping so many aspects of health care. Just understanding the new technologies is its own hurdle because of the tangle of names used to describe them, including telemedicine, telehealth, mobile health, mHealth, eHealth, digital tethering, etc. Nearly a decade ago, Harvard’s hospitals began coordinating all of these technologies under a single name: connected health. That concept is now catching on elsewhere and in April, 2013, the University of Pennsylvania organized a “Connected Health Symposium” that featured more than two dozen experts whose talks provided a coherent overarching sense of what the new technologies were and the many surprising ways they are knitting themselves together as a new sort of central “nervous system” across the whole of health care. The keynote speaker — Harvard’s Joseph Kvedar — provided the overview of the topic while the other 14 speakers addressed different digital parts of “connected health.” As managing editor and video producer at the LDI Health Economist magazine, I set out to report the overall essence of what “Connected Health” is all about. I organized and ran a three-camera video shoot of the event and then I edited the results into 15 succinct video programs that together enabled a LDI Health Economist viewer to experience the seminar and understand the subject as never before. I also wrote the text, did the still photography, designed and assembled the finished report and constructed the HTML that displayed it out the front end of the site.
