Joel Selanikio, MD
Physician, Futurist, Advisor, Innovator, Emergency Responder, and Technologist
SPEAKER FEE RANGE: $20,000–$30,000 [FEE NOTE]
TRAVELS FROM: District of Columbia
Joel Selanikio combines the worlds of technology, public health, emergency response, and clinical medicine and speaks to the last thirty years of technology change — including web, mobile, AI and robotics — and its impact on the future of healthcare and medicine Dr. Selanikio is the recipient of both the $100,000 Lemelson-MIT Award for Sustainable Innovation and the Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Award for Healthcare A TED speaker, Dr. Selanikio engages audiences in thoughtful explorations of history, technology, and healthcare, providing answers and provoking questions.
A practicing physician, technologist, emergency responder, TED speaker, and entrepreneur, Joel Selanikio bridges the worlds of healthcare, global health and technology to illustrate opportunities in the application of artificial intelligence (AI), big data, cloud computing, and mobile technology to health, healthcare, and social challenges. A former CDC outbreak investigator and Ebola clinic director, he also frequently speaks about the challenges of providing clinical services in "the hot zone", and the role that technology can play in those environments.
A recognized innovator in global health, technology, and social enterprise, his broad career has allowed him to observe and leverage the great technological changes of our time – including the worldwide shift from personal computers to mobile, the adoption of cloud technologies, and the growing application of big data to healthcare – as few others have done. Named in 2009 as one of Forbes' "most powerful innovators", he is a recipient of both the $100,000 Lemelson-MIT Award for Sustainable Innovation and the Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Award for Healthcare for his work in healthcare technology. A TED speaker, he has spoken at or provided consultation to organizations including the Royal Society of Medicine, Harvard, Stanford School of Business, DARPA, the World Economic Forum at Davos, and Google – and been profiled by the Wall Street Journal, NPR, Economist, CNN, Fox News, and the BBC, among others.
As co-founder of Magpi, the first web application created in the international development sector, he has been a leading advocate for the application of Silicon Valley business and technology models to the information technology needs of global health and international development, and he is a co-author of the recently-released "Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation: International Case Studies and Practice" and the upcoming "Global Health Informatics: Principles and Application of eHealth and mHealth to Improve Quality of Care" from MIT.
Selanikio is a graduate of Haverford College and the Brown University School of Medicine, as well as the CDC's Epidemic Intelligence Service fellowship, and he continues to practice pediatrics at Georgetown University.
A recognized innovator in global health, technology, and social enterprise, his broad career has allowed him to observe and leverage the great technological changes of our time – including the worldwide shift from personal computers to mobile, the adoption of cloud technologies, and the growing application of big data to healthcare – as few others have done. Named in 2009 as one of Forbes' "most powerful innovators", he is a recipient of both the $100,000 Lemelson-MIT Award for Sustainable Innovation and the Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Award for Healthcare for his work in healthcare technology. A TED speaker, he has spoken at or provided consultation to organizations including the Royal Society of Medicine, Harvard, Stanford School of Business, DARPA, the World Economic Forum at Davos, and Google – and been profiled by the Wall Street Journal, NPR, Economist, CNN, Fox News, and the BBC, among others.
As co-founder of Magpi, the first web application created in the international development sector, he has been a leading advocate for the application of Silicon Valley business and technology models to the information technology needs of global health and international development, and he is a co-author of the recently-released "Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation: International Case Studies and Practice" and the upcoming "Global Health Informatics: Principles and Application of eHealth and mHealth to Improve Quality of Care" from MIT.
Selanikio is a graduate of Haverford College and the Brown University School of Medicine, as well as the CDC's Epidemic Intelligence Service fellowship, and he continues to practice pediatrics at Georgetown University.
- Running The Hot Zone
A veteran of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Epidemic Intelligence Service and an experienced emergency responder, Dr. Joel Selanikio took six weeks in the winter of 2014-2015 to run an Ebola Treatment Center in the heart of the epidemic in Sierra Leone, an experience shared with NPR listeners in the form of an audio diary. Unprepared for a "treatment center" largely without effective treatments, or for a patient death rate of more than 60%, Dr. Selanikio speaks of the daily and intimate patient contact, the personal fear and exhaustion, the co-workers risking their lives, and the dignity of patients facing near-certain death in this moving, up-close discussion of one of the deadliest infectious disease outbreaks in modern history. - Collaboration in Science and Medicine
Collaboration has been the key to the acceleration of progress in medicine as well as other branches of science. In this talk, Dr. Joel Selanikio discusses how a lack of collaborative capacity in years past set back scientific progress by decades. He discusses the requirements for increased collaboration — communication and prosperity — and shows how the steady advance of both these phenomena has led to increased collaboration first in the West, and now increasingly in other newly-prosperous and connected areas of the world — notably China. Finally, he points out the prospects for further advancements and further collaboration as the centuries-long rise in living standards, education, and more recently connectivity bring for the first time the possibility of truly worldwide collaboration. - Disruption, the Consumerization of Tech, and Healthcare IT
We are almost fifty years into a titanic shift in technology, from institution-centric to consumer-first. The effects of this change are now being felt in the healthcare IT space, as medical staff accustomed to Uber and iPhones push back against antiquated, unconnected EHR (electronic health record) systems. What’s the nature of this secular shift, how did it happen, and what does it mean for the future of health, and of healthcare IT. Dr. Selanikio will take the audience through more than fifty years of accelerating change, and explain why the biggest changes in health tech are yet to come. - AI In Healthcare and Medicine
After decades of research, artificial intelligence and more specifically machine learning have been making great strides in medicine and healthcare, allowing algorithms to perform tasks previously requiring doctors and other specialized personnel. These advances include computer programs that can read chest x-rays for pneumonia, evaluate breath sounds for asthma, examine histological slides, and perform many others tasks, and robots that can take triage phone calls or even perform surgery. Dr. Selanikio discusses the historical and technological underpinnings of this revolution in healthcare and medicine, the current state of the art, and what we can expect in the future for patients, for healthcare providers, and for society.
We can help ideate, source and book speakers that aren't on our website, too. Leave an inquiry or call us at