Missouri Southern State University will host its first Willcoxon Innovation in Healthcare Summit on April 11-12, an event featuring speakers and provoking discussion about technology enhancements and innovative practices in healthcare.
Intended for students, healthcare professionals, and anyone who has an interest in healthcare, the summit will be the premier gathering in the region for innovative health discussions and feature several speakers who understand the importance of technological advances in medicine and health services. The event will be free for participants thanks to generous contributions from Joplin residents Dr. Bob and Dot Willcoxon.
Click here to register, or email Mark Scott scott-m@mssu.edu.
The event will begin Thursday, April 11, at 2 p.m. with a presentation by former U.S. Senator Roy Blunt, who has been engaged in many innovative health initiatives on Capitol Hill, and will continue at 8:30 a.m. Friday, April 12, with Keynote Speaker Dr. Christa Martin, the Chief Scientific Officer at the Pennsylvania-based Geisinger Health. Sessions following Martin on Friday will focus on the future delivery of healthcare and advances in technology and innovations in healthcare, along with presentations about local healthcare innovation.
“With the construction of the Roy Blunt Health Science Innovation Center on the horizon, it’s the perfect time to launch the Willcoxon Innovation in Healthcare Summit,” Missouri Southern President Dean Van Galen said. “The inaugural Summit will feature national and regional leaders speaking about exciting innovations in health sciences that will impact all of us. The Summit is not only for those in healthcare fields – we welcome the entire community to our campus to learn and be inspired by new ideas and innovative practices in healthcare.”
Following Martin on Friday at 10 a.m. will be Dr. Catherine Satterwhite, the Executive Director of the Center for Population Health and Equity at Kansas City University, and Dr. Robert McNab, Vice President of Medical Education for Freeman Health Systems, discussing the future delivery of healthcare. Then, at 11:20 a.m., Dr. Lance Forshee, an Associate Professor of Anatomy at the Bentonville, Ark.-based Alice L. Walton School of Medicine, will present on the advances in technology and therapy – specifically on artificial intelligence integration in medicine.
Following lunch, Dr. Mark McNemar, Mercy’s Regional Physician Executive, and Kevin Manning, the Chief Nursing Officer for Mercy, will answer questions regarding the future of healthcare in the four-state region.
The event caps a historic week for Missouri Southern, following the groundbreaking of the university’s new Roy Blunt Health Science Innovation Center at 1 p.m. Thursday.
Kicking things off Friday morning is Dr. Martin, the event’s keynote speaker. Vice Dean for Research at Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine, and Professor and founding Director of Geisinger’s Autism & Developmental Medicine Institute, she is a clinician-scientist with Board-certification in clinical laboratory genomics, who has played a leading role in developing Geisinger as a learning health system, bridging research discoveries and clinical medicine to bring precision health into everyday health care.
Geisinger, a rural healthcare system in Central and Northeast Pennsylvania, was founded more than 100 years ago by Abigail Geisinger and now serves more than 1 million people across its 10 hospital campuses. Dr. Martin’s strategic vision embraces a population health-based approach to patient care, guided by genomics, to develop a proactive, rather than reactive approach to medicine to prevent disease, detect it earlier, or treat it better.
Other speakers are:
- Dr. Catherine Lindsey Satterwhite, executive of the new Center for Population Health and Equity (CPHE) at Kansas City University. Dr. Satterwhite most recently worked as the regional health administrator for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Office of the Assistant Secretary of Health, where she was the senior federal public health official in the region, serving Kansas, Iowa, Missouri and Nebraska. She led diverse public health-related efforts, creating HHS policy and programming to best address the needs of the population. In addition, Dr. Satterwhite worked for more than a decade at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). While at the CDC she earned multiple awards for excellence in the practice of epidemiology.
- Dr. Rob McNab is a practicing internist in Joplin and the Vice President of Medical Education, Freeman Health Systems. He's been a longtime advocate for patient empowerment through education and became even more passionate about lifestyle medicine interventions after experiencing their effect on his own life. Now he's established an innovative model of healthcare to deliver better care to his patients. McNab Wellness is where patients go when they are tired of an endless cycle of illness and treatment and want to create foundational wellness in their lives. Dr. McNab has received specialized training in using lifestyle interventions to help people live longer and better.
- Dr. Lance Forshee serves as Associate Professor of Anatomy at Alice L. Walton School of Medicine. In this role, he is the course director for Phase I Structure and Function and Phase II Skin & Musculoskeletal blocks. He also leads efforts to include AI in the medical curriculum at the medical school. Prior to joining the School, Dr. Forshee held the position of Assistant Professor of Anatomy at Arkansas College of Osteopathic Medicine, where he performed medical education research and taught and course directed Fundamentals of Anatomical Sciences for master’s students. Previously, as an Assistant Professor of Biology at Southern Utah University, he taught several courses including Human Anatomy and Vertebrae Physiology.
- Dr. Mark McNemar, Mercy’s Regional Physician Executive, is the only American Osteopathic Board of Orthopedic Surgery-certified hand surgeon in the Joplin area. He was a founding physician member of Orthopedic Specialists of the Four States in 2010, where he also served as vice president. Dr. McNemar continued to practice and hold that title until the hospital was acquired by Mercy in 2020.
