For about 10 years, the AGA Tech Summit, sponsored by the AGA Center for GI Innovation and Technology, has brought together physician innovators, entrepreneurs, and industry representatives to facilitate innovation in gastroenterology practice, and this year is no exception.
Attendees will get a “comprehensive, almost immersive experience to understand what’s hot in gastroenterology and innovation in 2018, where the gaps are, and where we need future innovators to be successful to improve patient outcomes,” said Srinadh (Sri) Komanduri, MD, the medical director of the GI laboratory and director of interventional endoscopy at Northwestern University in Chicago, as well as one of the meeting’s organizers.
“If you step back and look at how we work in the U.S., so much money is put into innovation and the device industry, but we still don’t get new technology into our physicians’ hands to change patient outcomes in any meaningful time [frame],” Dr. Komanduri said. This is in part, he said, because of the many roadblocks innovators face.The meeting is designed to aid entrepreneurs, as well as physician innovators, who have ideas how to improve the field of gastroenterology but have found it daunting to take their ideas and commercialize them, added meeting organizer V. Raman Muthusamy, MD, the director of endoscopy for the University of California, Los Angeles, Health System. Dr. Muthusamy and Dr. Komanduri serve as cochairs of the AGA Center for GI Innovation and Technology executive committee.