Jim Carroll delivered the morning opening keynote address at the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans (IFEBP) 57th Annual Employee Benefits Congress in New Orleans, Louisiana in late 2011 — speaking at 7:30 AM to an audience of approximately 4,500 benefits professionals, trustees, administrators, and advisors. The talk, titled “Healthcare 2020: Today’s Trends, Tomorrow’s Opportunities,” challenged the benefits community to look past the political controversy surrounding healthcare reform and engage with the deeper, more consequential transformation underway: the technological reinvention of medicine itself. Carroll explored how genomics, connected health devices, mobile diagnostics, and AI-assisted clinical decision-making were building toward a healthcare system that would be unrecognizable by 2020 — one that rewarded the organizations and professionals who understood the science well enough to get ahead of it. Carroll later noted with characteristic humor that “what I do for a living is go out and talk to large groups of hungover people” — a description that, delivered in New Orleans, landed particularly well.
