Some photographs bring back an entire season. These take me back to 2023, to the opening of USC’s Capital Campus in Washington, D.C., and to a C2SHiP gathering there later that year. Family, friends, colleagues, students, and a remarkable amount of possibility in the same place.
There was so much dynamism then. There is so much dynamism now. Looking at these pictures, the connection between those two moments feels especially clear.
April 2023: opening the doors
On April 19, 2023, USC celebrated the grand opening of its Capital Campus at 1771 N Street NW, near Dupont Circle. President Carol Folt joined university leaders, alumni, and friends to mark a new home for USC in the nation’s capital.
At the opening, I joined Carol, our research colleagues Ish Puri and Steve Moldin, Robin Hejmej, and my family. The pictures bring back the people who made the occasion special, along with the sense that this new space could bring together people who ought to know one another.
Within days, I was writing to our C2SHiP leadership team about how we might connect our work with this new campus. The opportunity was wonderfully practical: bring the people developing healthcare technologies closer to the people thinking about research, policy, and how those technologies reach patients.
October 2023: putting that promise to work
About six months later, on October 26–27, we returned for the Center to Stream Healthcare in Place (C2SHiP) annual meeting and the NSF/FDA C2SHiP workshop. Within the campus’s opening year, we were bringing clinicians, engineers, industry partners, students, and federal colleagues into the same conversation.
In my October 31 note to our USC colleagues, I wrote, “To say it was a success is an understatement.” Eighteen companies and six universities were represented, along with our NSF START students, many of whom were first-generation students. That mix of people was a large part of what made the gathering work.
Helping devices work together, and bringing care home
The October 27 workshop was titled “Improving the Quality of Home Health Care with Interoperable Medical Devices: Clinical Opportunities and Regulatory Science Gaps.” It focused on a challenge central to C2SHiP: how to make connected technologies useful in the places where people actually live.
The workshop agenda moved from clinical needs in home monitoring to the engineering of device systems that can work together, then to making sense of their data, regulatory pathways, and secure information sharing. Janet Roveda and I chaired the sessions on using the data and on data security and sharing.
Interoperability can sound like an engineering word, but its implications are deeply human. A measurement taken at home needs to reach the right place, carry enough context to be understood, and support a useful response. The meeting gave clinical, technical, industry, and regulatory perspectives room to inform one another.
For those of us working in limb preservation, the connection is familiar. So much of a person’s life happens between clinic visits. Bringing care into that life takes clinical insight, good engineering, evidence, and collaboration. Those were exactly the kinds of conversations this gathering was designed to encourage.
The people, then and now
Our students belong in this memory, too. Having the NSF START students alongside experienced researchers and industry partners made room for the next generation to join the work. And these meetings depend on extraordinary hosts. In that same October note, I called Felicia Pratt, who managed the campus, “an absolute gem.”
That same energy continues in our weekly C2SHiP ThinkTank, where ideas from different fields keep finding one another. Earlier this year, Natalie’s presentation on the food-energy-water nexus and data centers gave our digital-health community a fresh set of public-health questions to consider. The conversation keeps expanding.
Looking back at the opening and the rooftop gathering that followed, I see the same shared purpose: bringing people together so that better care can reach more people, closer to home. So much dynamism, then and now.
This is what it’s all about.
From the archive: USC Capital Campus opening, April 19, 2023; C2SHiP annual meeting and interoperability workshop, October 26–27, 2023. Attendance figures and meeting recollections are drawn from my October 31, 2023, note following the gathering.
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