For those of you just arriving at the World Health Care Blog, welcome! The blog has, to date, been a repository for Lloyd Davis’ numerous interviews and exhaustive notes from the World Health Care Congress Europe. The conference, which ran from Monday through Wednesday of this week in Barcelona, convened leaders of many of the continent’s most interesting and innovative health care-related initiatives as well as a few of their American counterparts for an intense discussion of how the industry’s evolving to advance health care quality, improve access, and contain costs. Among the many speakers whose talks Lloyd reported on:

• Dr. Hans Jürgen Ahrens, Chairman, AOK-Bundesverband, Germany
• Cor Spreeuwenberg, Dean, Faculty of Health Sciences, Professor, Department of Integrated Care, at University Maastricht, Netherlands
• 
  David Nicholson, Chief Executive of the UK’s NHS
• Marina Geli, Minister of Health for Catalonia
• George Halvorsen, the Chairman and CEO, Kaiser Foundation Health Plans and Hospitals
• Walter Bergamaschi, General Director, Information Systems, Ministry of Health for Italy
• Bernard Kouchner, co-founder of Doctors Without Borders and of Médecins du Monde
• Jennifer Dixon, Director of Health Policy at the King’s Fund in the UK and a board member of both the Audit Commission and the Healthcare Commission
• Jack Lord, CEO of Humana

And be sure not to miss this exclusive interview with Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Bangladeshi banker and economist who here discusses his prescription for reforming health care in his and other developing countries. We’ll be compiling all posts from the blog into a reference link in the next day or two - for now please take a look back at the last few days of coverage by scrolling down from this post.

With that said…

With that said we move on to the next, equally exciting phase of this new blog of ours: a group discussion, led by some of the field’s most insightful bloggers, on the broad theme of innovation in the industry. Tune in over the next few weeks and you’ll find an expanding cast of contributors discussing and debating the issues, challenges, and opportunities that face this massive and ever-changing sector of our economy and civil society.

Kicking off the discussion (they’ll be joined by others): Matthew Holt of the Health Care Blog, Derek Lowe of In the Pipeline, Emily DeVoto of The Antidote, and David Williams of the Health Business Blog.

If case you’re not familiar with them - they’re some of the blogosphere’s keenest observers, commentators, and reporters on health care and we’re thrilled they’ve agreed to join us here for what we hope will be an interesting and edifying discussion in the weeks leading up to the World Health Care Congress, the World Congress’ signature event (find out more about the event, which runs from April 22-24 in Washington, DC here). We encourage you to engage with them and the blog in general - some of them will be attending the event as well and our hope is that some of the discussions that start here on the blog will be continued at the event itself.