In a darkened ballroom at the KPMG Lakehouse, an audience of hundreds waited expectantly. Suddenly, a spotlight found a nurse rising from her seat to belt out in song. Then another nurse, this one male, joined her under a second spotlight. One by one, more singers in scrubs arose from the audience. Stepping on stage, the vocalists formed the thunderous ensemble of New York’s own Northwell Health Nurse Choir. We had just witnessed a thrilling flash mob kickoff of the 2024 Lake Nona Impact Forum.

“Be prepared to be transformed by others,” intoned Gloria Caulfield, Tavistock’s top manager of the Impact Forum, as she formally opened the conference. At the forum, all paths lead to Gloria, at least according to the many participants I chatted with during the three-day-long event. With those few carefully chosen words, Gloria had perfectly framed one of this year’s major themes, the struggle to overcome adversity in its many forms: physical, psychological and social. In tackling such weighty issues, the 2024 forum, happily bridging the leap day from February 28 to March 1, might have been the best yet. 

If you are new to Lake Nona or have lived in our neighborhood for a while, don’t be ashamed if you have never heard of the Lake Nona Impact Forum. Securing a seat at the forum is by invitation only, so the number of neighbors in attendance you could count on one hand, or really just a couple of fingers. Those invited are top leaders and innovators in their fields, disciplines that as a rule focus on health and wellness. To give you an idea of the level of the invitees, let’s rattle off a few of the names speaking at this year’s event: Sanjay Gupta, Martin Luther King III, snowboarder Shaun White, chef José Andrés, astronaut Peggy Whitson, John Grisham and the biggest surprise of all, Jeff Bezos. But some of the more intriguing and instructive presentations at the forum came from relative unknowns who had achieved seemingly superhuman accomplishments … but we’ll get into that below. Luckily for you, the organizers of the Impact Forum look kindly upon Nonahood News and reserved a ticket this year for your reporter so that you could gain a feel both of the ambiance of the conference and a taste of the cutting-edge discussions heard.

The first presentation was the hardest to watch. The year was 2006, and ABC television news anchor Bob Woodruff, embedded with U.S. infantry troops, was riding on the back of an armored personnel carrier north of Baghdad. A sudden blast from an IED shook the sky, and Woodruff lost consciousness, having sustained intense shrapnel damage to his skull. He woke up 36 days later at the Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland. “Had I been leaning forward or backward just a few inches that day, I would not be alive today,” whispered Woodruff. Further luck combined to help save his life. Ignoring orders from superiors, nearby military helicopter pilots landed at a highly dangerous spot to whisk him away to the Baghdad airport, securing his flight home. And in Bethesda, he received the best medical care possible. “No concerns about malpractice” during his hospital stay, quipped Woodruff. Nevertheless, the blast left him with lasting brain injuries.

This brutal accident and difficult recovery led Woodruff to explore the very real problems our veterans face to readjust to civilian life. To make a meaningful contribution to their well-being, he founded the Woodruff Foundation. “I never thought that the foundation would last so long,” conceded Woodruff, as he revealed that in the past decade, the organization had amassed donations of nearly $160 million. Fast forward to 2023. Videos overhead flash scenes of Woodruff revisiting the scene of his accident near Baghdad and his emotional encounters with Iraqi civilians he had interviewed 17 years earlier. As the presentation drew to a close, former Surgeon General Richard Carmona rose to the stage to present Woodruff with a special honor, the Impact Forum’s “Adversity to Impact” award. Hard to conceive of greater adversity than that faced – and overcome – by veteran reporter Bob Woodruff.

Woodruff’s wrenching life story was followed by sessions featuring Iman Abuzeid, the CEO of Incredible Health, and Dame Emma Walmsley, who heads up GlaxoSmithKline, or GSK. Abuzeid brought us the unwelcome news that the U.S. healthcare industry currently confronts a shortage of one million nurses, a shortfall she expects to last for decades. To alleviate this alarming state of affairs, Incredible Health has turned the tables on recruiting: Under Abuzeid’s direction, hospitals now contact nurses as possible hires for open positions, rather than requiring nurses to apply for these same jobs. And Abuzeid has succeeded with this innovative approach toward nurse recruitment with a staff of 100% remote workers. In her presentation, Dame Walmsley raised issues of common concern within the healthcare industry. “We are aging unhealthily,” she contends, and the industry, particularly in the United States, copes with persistent challenges in achieving equity that will require considerable innovation to resolve. “We have to prevent illness before it starts, to get ahead of disease,” cautions Walmsley, but attaining that objective will be difficult if pharmaceutical companies continue to rake in profits by super-serving the rich. Meanwhile, GSK has marked out a corporate goal to “positively impact the health of 2.5 billion people by the end of the decade.”

The Gupta brothers, Suneel and his famous brother, Sanjay, CNN’s health correspondent, now took the stage. Sanjay Gupta is a name that you would hardly associate with failure. Nonetheless, Suneel, 10 years younger than his famous brother, had become the “face of failure” when a New York Times article described his unsuccessful attempts to secure investor funding for his start-up at a 2012 conference called FailCon. Problem was, no investors were present at that FailCon. A Times reporter did, however, pay close attention to Suneel’s keynote address and dubbed him with that unfortunate, and not entirely truthful, moniker. Later, Suneel successfully co-founded Rise, a telemedicine company connecting patients online with personal nutritionists. But the FailCon experience caused Suneel to think deeply about failure, not as the “opposite of success” but as a genuine pathway to success. That is, says Suneel, if you learn from your setbacks. In the audience were Mom and Pop Gupta, who basked in deafening applause at the end of the session as they rose to salute the crowd – as well as their two accomplished sons, one of whom, in his own personal way, had embraced, and eventually defeated, adversity.

Who would have expected to find bestseller phenomenon John Grisham at a wellness conference speaking about innovative medical treatments? In one of the forum’s more remarkable sessions, Grisham explained that after moving to Charlottesville, Virginia, he initially hesitated to join the board of the Focused Ultrasound Foundation chaired by fellow panelist Neal Kassell. “I’m a writer, not a medical professional,” argued Grisham. But Kassel insisted, and Grisham decided to contribute to the effort. The session’s moderator, Juju Chang, co-anchor of ABC’s Nightline, introduced Beverly MacGowan, who had long suffered from a severe case of essential tremor. Videos on stage showed clips of Beverly at her kitchen sink struggling to pour, and hold steady, a glass of water. Her right hand shook uncontrollably. Simple joys of daily life, like dining at restaurants, had become impossible, and she was forced to quit her job. Hope for Beverly came when she learned of focused ultrasound. 

Speaking with an eloquence surpassing that of many credentialed presenters, Beverly described her treatment in precise detail. In the hospital, she donned a netlike headpiece topped with a cooling bag of water and slid several times in and out of an MRI scanner. The MRI’s ultrasound waves focused on the section of her brain that controls motor movements. Just one session of ultrasound therapy sufficed to heal her. To demonstrate the success of her treatment, Beverly rose, and before a stunned audience, stretched out her right arm to hold a perfectly motionless glass of water. (At the evening reception, I had the good fortune to bump into Beverly. I praised her for her courage in speaking so honestly about a medical condition that most of us would prefer to conceal. For me, that brief chat was a real highlight of the conference. It occurred to me that at the forum, Beverly was the only actual patient – that is, patient speaking as a patient – a fact that lent such authenticity to her remarks.)

The KPMG Lakehouse is a vast structure, an impressive architectural achievement. On the inside, at least. You could easily make your daily 10,000 steps just making your way from the conference hall to the many dining stations, where you have your pick of a wide array of cuisines. On the first day, for lunch, the lobster ravioli caught my eye, a personal version of which the chef whipped up for me on the spot. The next day, seafood linguini popped up on the menu, so I again partook. Food and beverages are not lacking at the Lakehouse. “We only open this building to the outside world once a year, for this event, the Lake Nona Impact Forum,” announced Laura Newinski, the Chief Operating Officer of KPMG, as she welcomed us to her facility.

Later that day, the Lakehouse’s luxuriant lawns offered an inviting, and oddly peaceful, setting for that evening’s dinner reception. Your reporter, having reluctantly skipped chef José Andrés’ presentation, slipped into the reception room early and quickly spotted enormous pots of paella awaiting a willing diner. Still later that evening, the lobby bar at the Wave Hotel hummed with the enthusiasm of many familiar faces, that is, those forum participants lucky enough to have booked accommodation at our “neighborhood living room.” Reflecting on the scene, my aged brain – having absorbed gripping stories of exceptionally courageous individuals who had confronted and conquered debilitating medical adversity – bulged with news from the healthcare front. But I also learned this: that many of the seemingly staid doctors and medical industry execs who attend the annual Lake Nona Impact Forum do know how to have a bit of fun after hours!

Also of importance: Chip Bergh, the CEO of Levi’s, explained that his company’s reputation for antigun activism had produced the opposite of what the experts expected: the company grew by 40%. Levi’s is also known as a leader in campaigns to guarantee access to voting. ….. Speaking of elections, few of us would associate medical care with the right to vote. But not Dr. Alister Martin. One day, by chance, he asked one of his patients, an American citizen, if she had voted. No, she replied, adding that “no one ever asked me that question,” and “I didn’t know I could vote.” Martin couldn’t believe his ears. His initial disbelief led to the founding of A Healthier Democracy, whose stated goal is to build “platforms for collaboration and community organizing at the intersection of health and civic engagement.” Such a simple but potentially transformative concept: leveraging the vast resources of our nation’s healthcare professionals to shore up our fragile democracy. ….. Inventor extraordinaire Dean Kamen, a regular forum speaker, spoke with pride about the latest iteration of his brainchild, the FIRST Global Challenge, where teams of young scientists from over 190 countries convene annually to best one another in building a winning robot. The 2023 event, held in Singapore, required competitors to build and navigate a robot that, according to the organization’s website, would “produce hydrogen and use it to store, transport and convert energy.” The real goal of the contest was to encourage the development of renewable energy technologies. ….. One surprise star of the forum was Mick Ebeling, founder of Not Impossible Labs, who described to us his company’s Project Daniel. The Daniel in question was a South Sudanese teenager who had lost both his arms from a rocket blast a dozen years ago. Hearing of Daniel’s plight, Ebeling spun into action and led his labs to produce the first prosthetic limbs using 3D printing. Equipped with his newly manufactured arms, Daniel could feed himself for the first time in years. Ebeling’s lab has also conducted experiments to help deaf individuals experience music using devices that emit powerful vibrations. 

Next month in Nonahood News: “We are going back to the moon, then to Mars and beyond.” Plus, the convergence of health and wellness with space and artificial intelligence as we continue our reporting on the 2024 Lake Nona Impact Forum.