2019 Conference recap
On November 13-15, 2019, over 750 complex care leaders from across the country gathered in Memphis, Tennessee for our fourth annual — and largest yet — Putting Care at the Center conference.
Last year’s conference, co-hosted with Regional One Health, had the theme It takes an ecosystem: Complex care across the community. The importance of complex care ecosystems, communities whose organizations and sectors engage deeply with each other to better serve people with complex needs, resonated throughout the conference.
“Interdependence — from small community-based non-profits to large hospital networks,” said Camden Coalition CEO Kathleen Noonan in her welcome address. “Interdependence is, in fact, the strength of ecosystems. And in this complex care movement we’re advancing, it’s the key to our collective success.”
Storytelling was another major theme of the conference. Conference keynote Abraham Verghese, Senior Associate Chair at Stanford University School of Medicine, told the story of being a young infectious disease doctor in rural Tennessee at the beginning of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and the impact it had on his medical practice.
“One of the most profound lessons I learned,” he said, “was that when I could not cure, I could still heal. I think there’s an analogy to what you do in complex care: there is a relationship formed that changes behavior. Complex care is about being attentive to the small things, which impacts the big things.”
2019 Resources
2019 Storyshare video