Innovation in modern medicine presents a complex challenge. One of the greatest opportunities is creating potential for cross-disciplinary collaboration. The CIMIT Convening Program endeavors to lead and innovate in convening, providing an honest broker environment at the intersection of academia, government and industry.

Our goal is to be a resource and an educator to help participants learn how to be better presenters, interviewers and moderators in this era of evolving social networks and exponentially advancing technologies.

We analyze and implement ideas and tools using experimental designs for convening that stimulate participants to think differently about a topic or problem. We promote the exchange of ideas between diverse communities, and provide an arena where interactive and interdisciplinary discussion can lead to scientific breakthroughs.

With the aim of harnessing collective intelligence we utilize tools including:

• Blogs
• Podcasts
• Online Video and Audio Media Streams
• Wikipedia Articles
• Live Webcasts of the weekly CIMIT Forum

Convening Program participants expect to be highly interactive and challenged (even agitated) generating stimulating questions and discussion rather than canned talks. Contributors are a diverse group of practitioners and researchers, including scientists, clinicians, engineers and educators. Our design includes:

• Background preparation (including demographics of the audience, background on the topic and speaker buy-in)
• Moderator training
• Experimental tools
• Positive disruption
• Just-in-time presentation of data (including topic inquiries, web-based)
• Real-time audience feedback to speaker
• Post session evaluation and assessment of the experiment (impact of the session and the process)

The CIMIT Convening Program was launched in 2008 with a gift from John Abele and the Argosy Foundation. The program applies human and technological resources, social networking and decision support tools to evaluate and facilitate collaboration and innovation in healthcare.