But let’s not forget that three years ago – just as then-President Trump was announced as the HIMSS keynote – COVID ripped across the world.  In 2020, at the 12^th hour, HIMSS decided to cancel the Davos of health information and digital health for the first time in more than half a century.  In the days preceding the decision, many of us were on pins and needles waiting for the shoe to drop finally – and it did after mega exhibitors pulled out to protect their staff and Florida shut down to the outside world.

How Three Years Changed Mindsets or Not?

Much has changed in those three years. The former president has been indicted; COVID has supposedly been tamed; big exhibitors with 40 by 40 space return to the rightful places at Chicago’s McCormick Convention Center; 30,000 people will be running to educational and continuing education sessions and networking events and, most importantly, conversations on how the health ecosystem will address the unfulfilled potential of digital health and aggregated intelligence (AI) and protect our precious, personal health data with cybersecurity technologies will be the talk of the hallways.

Salute to HIMSS Staff – The Backbone of a Great Conference

Behind the scenes, HIMSS staff work diligently to address the needs of this ever-growing professional community.  While most people rightfully run from speaker sessions throughout the day, far fewer realize that the program is mainly built through membership participation. HIMSS is more like a peer-review medical conference than a for-profit entity.  Countless abstracts are submitted for review by volunteer working groups, graded and debated and those accepted to make it into the program. 

Mentors are assigned to the speakers to check in on their progress and content development.  Little is left to chance and “winged on stage.”  The HIMSS staff are considering all the little details, including assigning program committee members to introduce speaker sessions – highlighting the 300+ speakers and their content.  If the Jackson Browne hit song “Stay” salutes the roadies that put together and pull down his road-tour stage, HIMSS staff deserve a song commemorating their exceptional work.

HIMSS differs from the many key conferences around health innovation – it’s geared to the grass tops, chief information, strategy and technology officers, and the grassroots experts in digital health information where the rubber meets the road in operations and transformation.  You will find folks from the Federal government who can advance policies that improve access to information and its security, along with hard-working staff from agencies tasked with getting the job done.

Embrace the Good – Put Aside Your Darts

People love throwing darts at industry gatherings that have made it, and HIMSS takes its fair share of pundit swipes.  That said, in August 2021 in Las Vegas, HIMSS pioneered the way back to industry conferences by putting in place protocols requiring a COVID inoculation confirmation, a negative COVID task and masks.  If it came late to the public health shut-down party in 2020, it more than made amends one year later, courageously paving the way for the community to reunite!  Other groups, such as CNS Summit, built on that model and added even more confidence-generating approaches to unite the community.

If, in 2019, HIMSS added patient engagement and experience to its conference theme, this year’s theme hints at something that can make our innovations workable and meaningful – collaboration.  We don’t lack good ideas – we lack encouragement and incentives to work well together and operationalize!  As much as we invent new ways to apply information, we fear change and prefer to stick with the known – even if it’s suboptimal patient care. 

Physicians claim that the time spent on “managing information systems” or depending on those systems for answers is burning them out and keeping them from their primary mission – caring for people seeking solutions.  If so, then information technology is not meeting its mission –fixing one thing and breaking the ties between physician and patient. 

Conversation Can Lead to Solutions

While the hundreds of sessions at HIMSS will offer new knowledge, don’t forget to spend time in the hallways – meeting people, sharing ideas (and problems) and “keeping it real.”  The magic of technology isn’t the organization of massive amounts of data – it’s making more time to be us and fulfill our life missions. In health, that is connecting healers with those people seeking to be healed.

See you in the Windy City of Chicago.  I will be masked!  My COVID shots – inoculations and booster are up-to-date, and I’ll test each day.  When it comes to people’s health – public health – we can all make an extra effort. I come for the people, conversations and belief that in speaking with each other, we will continually piece together puzzle pieces of the divided health information ecosystem.

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Diego never imagined he’d carry a gun.

Not as a child, when shots were fired outside his Chicago-area home. Not at age 12, when one of his friends was gunned down.

Diego’s mind changed at 14, when he and his friends were getting ready to walk to midnight Mass for the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. But instead of hymns, Diego heard gunfire, and then screaming. A gang member shot two people, including one of Diego’s friends, who was hit nine times.

“My friend was bleeding out,” said Diego, who asked KHN not to use his last name to protect his safety and privacy. As his friend lay on the ground, “he was choking on his own blood.”

The attack left Diego’s friend paralyzed from the waist down. And it left Diego, one of a growing number of teens who witness gun violence, traumatized and afraid to go outside without a gun.

Research shows that adolescents exposed to gun violence are twice as likely as others to perpetrate a serious violent crime within two years, perpetuating a cycle that can be hard to interrupt.

Diego asked his friends for help finding a handgun and — in a country supersaturated with firearms — they had no trouble procuring one, which they gave him free.

“I felt safer with the gun,” said Diego, now 21. “I hoped I wouldn’t use it.”

For two years, Diego kept the gun only as a deterrent. When he finally pulled the trigger, it changed his life forever.

Disturbing Trends

The news media focuses heavily on mass shootings and the mental state of the people who commit them. But there is a far larger epidemic of gun violence — particularly among Black, Hispanic, and Native American youth — ensnaring some kids not even old enough to get a driver’s license.

Research shows that chronic exposure to trauma can change the way a child’s brain develops. Trauma also can play a central role in explaining why some young people look to guns for protection and wind up using them against their peers.

The number of children under 18 who killed someone with a firearm jumped from 836 in 2019 to 1,150 in 2020.

In New York City, the number of young people who killed someone with a gun more than doubled, rising from 48 juvenile offenders in 2019 to 124 in 2022, according to data from the city’s police department.

Youth gun violence increased more modestly in other cities; in many places, the number of teen gun homicides rose in 2020 but has since fallen closer to pre-pandemic levels.

Researchers who analyze crime statistics stress that teens are not driving the overall rise in gun violence, which has increased across all ages. In 2020, 7.5% of homicide arrests involved children under 18, a slightly smaller share than in previous years.

Local leaders have struggled with the best way to respond to teen shootings.

A handful of communities — including Pittsburgh; Fulton County, Georgia; and Prince George’s County, Maryland — have debated or implemented youth curfews to curb teen violence. What’s not in dispute: More people ages 1 to 19 die by gun violence than by any other cause.

A Lifetime of Limits

The devastating toll of gun violence shows up in emergency rooms every day.

At the UChicago Medicine trauma center, the number of gunshot wounds in children under 16 has doubled in the past six years, said Dr. Selwyn Rogers, the center’s founding director. The youngest victim was 2. “You hear the mother wail, or the brother say, ‘It’s not true,’” said Rogers, who works with local youth as the hospital’s executive vice president for community health engagement. “You have to be present in that moment, but then walk out the door and deal with it all over again.”

In recent years, the justice system has struggled to balance the need for public safety with compassion for kids, based on research that shows a young person’s brain doesn’t fully mature until age 25. Most young offenders “age out” of criminal or violent behavior around the same time, as they develop more self-control and long-range thinking skills.

Yet teens accused of shootings are often charged as adults, which means they face harsher punishments than kids charged as juveniles, said Josh Rovner, director of youth justice at the Sentencing Project, which advocates for justice system reform.

About 53,000 juveniles in 2019 were charged as adults, which can have serious health repercussions. These teens are more likely to be victimized while incarcerated, Rovner said, and to be arrested again after release.

Young people can spend much of their lives in a poverty-imposed lockdown, never venturing far beyond their neighborhoods, learning little about opportunities that exist in the wider world, Rogers said. Millions of American children — particularly Black, Hispanic, and Native American kids — live in environments plagued by poverty, violence, and drug use.

The covid-19 pandemic amplified all those problems, from unemployment to food and housing insecurity.

Although no one can say with certainty what spurred the surge in shootings in 2020, research has long linked hopelessness and lack of trust in police — which increased after the murder of George Floyd that year — to an increased risk of community violence. Gun sales soared 64% from 2019 to 2020, while many violence prevention programs shut down.

One of the most serious losses children faced during the pandemic was the closure of schools — institutions that might provide the only stabilizing force in their young lives — for a year or more in many places.

“The pandemic just turned up the fire under the pot,” said Elise White, deputy director of research at the nonprofit Center for Justice Innovation, which works with communities and justice systems. “Looking back, it’s easy to underplay now just how uncertain that time [during the pandemic] felt. The more that people feel uncertain, the more they feel there’s no safety around them, the more likely they are to carry weapons.”

Of course, most children who experience hardship never break the law. Multiple studies have found that most gun violence is perpetrated by a relatively small number of people.

The presence of even one supportive adult can protect children from becoming involved with crime, said Dr. Abdullah Pratt, a UChicago Medicine emergency physician who lost his brother to gun violence.

Pratt also lost four friends to gun violence during the pandemic. All four died in his emergency room; one was the son of a hospital nurse.

Although Pratt grew up in a part of Chicago where street gangs were common, he benefited from the support of loving parents and strong role models, such as teachers and football coaches. Pratt was also protected by his older brother, who looked out for him and made sure gangs left the future doctor alone.

“Everything I’ve been able to accomplish,” Pratt said, “is because someone helped me.”

Growing Up in a ‘War Zone’

Diego had no adults at home to help him feel safe.

His parents were often violent. Once, in a drunken rage, Diego’s father grabbed him by the leg and swung him around the room, Diego said, and his mother once threw a toaster at his father.

At age 12, Diego’s efforts to help the family pay overdue bills — by selling marijuana and stealing from unlocked cars and apartments — led his father to throw him out of the house.

At 13, Diego joined a gang made up of neighborhood kids. Gang members — who recounted similar stories about leaving the house to escape abuse — gave him food and a place to stay. “We were like a family,” Diego said. When the kids were hungry, and there was no food at home, “we’d go to a gas station together to steal some breakfast.”

But Diego, who was smaller than most of the others, lived in fear. At 16, Diego weighed only 100 pounds. Bigger boys bullied and beat him up. And his successful hustle — selling stolen merchandise on the street for cash — got the attention of rival gang members, who threatened to rob him.

Children who experience chronic violence can develop a “war zone mentality,” becoming hypervigilant to threats, sometimes sensing danger where it doesn’t exist, said James Garbarino, an emeritus professor of psychology at Cornell University and Loyola University-Chicago. Kids who live with constant fear are more likely to look to firearms or gangs for protection. They can be triggered to take preemptive action — such as firing a gun without thinking — against a perceived threat.

“Their bodies are constantly ready for a fight,” said Gianna Tran, deputy executive director of the East Bay Asian Youth Center in Oakland, California, which works with young people living in poverty, trauma, and neglect.

Unlike mass shooters, who buy guns and ammunition because they’re intent on murder, most teen violence is not premeditated, Garbarino said.

In surveys, most young people who carry guns — including gang members — say they do so out of fear or to deter attacks, rather than perpetrate them. But fear of community violence, both from rivals and the police, can stoke an urban arms race, in which kids feel that only the foolish walk around without a weapon.

“Fundamentally, violence is a contagious disease,” said Dr. Gary Slutkin, founder of Cure Violence Global, which works to prevent community violence.

Although a small number of teens become hardened and remorseless, Pratt said, he sees far more shootings caused by “poor conflict resolution” and teenage impulsivity rather than a desire to kill.

Indeed, firearms and an immature teenage brain are a dangerous mix, Garbarino said. Alcohol and drugs can magnify the risk. When confronted with a potentially life-or-death situation, kids may act without thinking.

When Diego was 16, he was walking a girl to school and they were approached by three boys, including a gang member who, using obscene and threatening language, asked if Diego was also in a gang. Diego said he tried to walk past the boys, one of whom appeared to have a gun.

“I didn’t know how to fire a gun,” Diego said. “I just wanted them to get away.”

In news accounts of the shooting, witnesses said they heard five gunshots. “The only thing I remember is the sound of the shots,” Diego said. “Everything else was going in slow motion.”

Diego had shot two of the boys in the legs. The girl ran one way, and he ran another. Police arrested Diego at home a few hours later. He was tried as an adult, convicted of two counts of attempted homicide, and sentenced to 12 years.

A Second Chance

In the past two decades, the justice system has made major changes in the way it treats children.

Youth arrests for violent crime plummeted 67% from 2006 to 2020, and 40 states have made it harder to charge minors as adults. States also are adopting alternatives to incarceration, such as group homes that allow teens to remain in their communities, while providing treatment to help them change their behavior.

Because Diego was 17 when he was sentenced, he was sent to a juvenile facility, where he received therapy for the first time.

Diego finished high school while behind bars and went on to earn an associate’s degree from a community college. He and other young inmates went on field trips to theaters and the aquarium — places he had never been. The detention center director asked Diego to accompany her to events about juvenile justice reform, where he was invited to tell his story.

Those were eye-opening experiences for Diego, who realized he had seen very little of Chicago, even though he had spent his life there.

“Growing up, the only thing you see is your community,” said Diego, who was released after four years in detention, when the governor commuted his sentence. “You assume that is what the whole world is like.”

KHN data editor Holly K. Hacker and researcher Megan Kalata contributed to this report.

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CHICAGO, June 30, 2022 — The Chicago ARC, a new venture collaborative focused on accelerating health equity solutions, has signed Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs) with the University of Chicago Medicine and Sinai Chicago as the organization’s first Founding Healthcare Partners, where they will play a crucial role in directing and piloting new technologies to transform healthcare and improve health equity in Chicago and beyond.

The Chicago ARC was founded on the belief that where you live, work, and play should be positive drivers of your health and how you receive healthcare. Areas of focus and impact for the Chicago ARC include maternal and child health, chronic disease management, rural healthcare, aging in place, behavioral and mental health, and cancer diagnosis.

“We’re creating an innovation community in Chicago centered on the healthcare providers and communities they serve,” said executive director Kate Merton, Ph.D., who previously launched the digital health incubator for Anthem and ran the East coast region of JLABS, J&J Innovations’ science incubator and accelerator lab. “With unprecedented access to and involvement from Healthcare Partners, startups will be able to direct their efforts for the greatest impact and benefit from Partner expertise and clinical networks to test, model and scale new solutions.”

Chicago ARC builds upon the proven ARC model (Accelerate, Redesign, Collaborate) of Sheba Medical Center — a Newsweek Top-10 global hospital — which brings together startups with experienced operators and an extensive healthcare partner network.

“Health systems in Chicago and the Midwest create Sheba’s North American epicenter for bringing global innovation and U.S. healthcare communities together – and the Chicago ARC is bringing that community together in new ways to invite more global investment and innovation,” said Dr. Eyal Zimlichman, chief digital transformation officer and chief innovation officer for Sheba Medical Center. “Now, by combining expertise and market opportunity, Chicago ARC and its Healthcare Partners will catalyze new solutions for some of our biggest healthcare challenges. Sheba Medical Center will share our experience to impact equitable healthcare and benefit from learning together with Chicago-area health systems and the community.”

Areas of Focus for Healthcare Partners

Healthcare Partners will pilot technologies that meet the needs of healthcare professionals and the communities they serve, create a community of learning to connect local and global best practices, and promote collaboration and joint projects. In addition, organizations have prioritized areas for increased focus or additional collaboration.

Kenneth S. Polonsky, MD, Executive Vice President for Medical Affairs and Dean of the Biological Sciences Division at the University of Chicago: “The South Side of Chicago has experienced shrinking health care resources for many years. Partnering with the Chicago ARC creates the dual benefit of identifying and integrating global technologies that meet the needs of our patients and healthcare professionals while enabling the University of Chicago to bring its research and innovation expertise to a local and global community seeking to address health inequities. As a partner, we plan to help enhance and utilize UChicago as a community engagement and collaboration epicenter to understand — and address effectively — the South Side community priorities and needs.”

Dr. Ngozi Ezike, president and CEO, Sinai Chicago: “As the largest private safety-net health system in Illinois, the communities Sinai Chicago serves face some of the city’s most severe systemic barriers and suffer the greatest health inequities. Sinai has a successful track record of working in collaboration with the communities we serve across the South and West Sides of Chicago. Working with the Chicago ARC will support Sinai in scaling our existing programs and resources to further serve our patients equitably and effectively.”

The Chicago ARC also presents significant opportunities for international collaboration, in a model that can be replicated in other U.S. markets. “The work Chicago ARC is undertaking with partners in Israel is an example of how Israel and the United States can share expertise to have a significant impact on the realization of equitable healthcare through innovation and community collaboration,” said Yinam Cohen, Consul General of Israel to the Midwest. “The top research institutions, health systems partners, and providers of Chicago and the Midwest – like those the Chicago ARC is bringing together – present an excellent opportunity for Israeli startups looking to establish and expand their presence in the U.S.” 

About Chicago ARC The Chicago ARC is on a mission to accelerate tomorrow’s healthcare solutions to those in need today. Its venture collaborative provides a trusted U.S. partner for startups, accelerating market entry and growth through matched commercial opportunities, investment, and end-to-end support. The Chicago ARC will be the centerpiece of a $3.8 billion health-focused Bronzeville Lakefront along the scenic shore of Lake Michigan next to downtown Chicago and the largest convention center in the Western Hemisphere. Chicago is the top U.S. city for foreign direct investment, corporate relocations, life science VC funding growth, and female founders. The region is home to over 1,600 life science companies, three tier-1 research institutions, and over 28,000 physicians. For more information, visit https://www.chicagoarc.health/.  

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