Disruptive innovation in healthcare that has realistic potential
to succeed in the marketplace and improve our healthcare experience.
Post 1: Background
I
have been following innovation in healthcare since 2004 from initial visionary
thought leadership on EHR systems enabling population health management and
analytics, to exploring the potential for ICT in global health, mobile health,
and personalized healthcare back in 2007/2008 before mHealth and pHealth became
industry buzz words. While I was actively following the market this last
decade and wrote thought leadership papers during grad school on transforming
healthcare as we know it with disruptive innovation for personalized healthcare
and enabling greater global access to diagnostics and treatment, most of my
musings were from a strategic big picture lens. I didn’t realize until
recently that some of these thoughts were worth publishing and pursuing straight
out of grad school as I see some of this vision already coming to fruition by
various start ups who have impressively pursued and executed on ideas around
mobile and personalized healthcare.
My
experience on the health care team of an early stage venture fund in grad
school helped me realize I needed some more practical experience at a premier
healthcare innovation company to strengthen my strategic advice with some
actual implementation experience in healthcare to help inform my perspective on
what healthcare innovation is more likely to succeed in the marketplace.
So,
since grad school, for the last four years, I’ve been entrenched in innovation
in medical devices, exploring next frontier technology for diagnostics and
treatment, and most recently following innovation in digital health and
wearable computing for diagnostics and remote patient monitoring. However,
most valuable was my hands on experience at Medtronic, where I was able to
finally apply both my strategic and practical implementation experience in
launching new products globally and strategically shaping opportunities for
monetizing product and business innovation across the care continuum, and
actually rolling up my sleeves and implementing pilot projects I developed from
idea to design.
First,
I learned a ton in the Cardiac Arrythmias division, managing a global product
launch of a suite of new products we had just acquired from start-up
acquisitions for treating Atrial Fibrillation, fortunately in an
entrepreneurial team that tried to preserve the pace and culture of the
startups Medtronic had just acquired. Moving onto my next experience in
the Cardiovascular business, I valued most what I learned from implementing and
iterating pilot projects I led from concept to design. Responsible for growing
Endovascular therapy across Western Europe, I learned the value of lean start
up mode in action of getting out in front of customers early and iterating
pilot prototypes quickly and often, and then finally learning what it took to get
pilot projects successfully off the ground with continued positive energy,
persuasive selling and persistence in the daily blocking and tackling with
internal and external stakeholders in a different cultural environment from the
US. This real implementation experience was invaluable, thanks to an incredible
boss and team who worked with a nimble, entrepreneurial mindset within the
construct of a large company. All this, coupled with my most recent experience
leading product and business innovation to monetize services across the care
continuum, I'd say over the course of the 4 years, I’ve gained more experience
and perspective than I expected when joining Medtronic.
Why blog and share my thoughts now?
It
is only in March, after I was so inspired by Eric Topol’s keynote speech at
HIMSS 2013 in New Orleans, that I first realized there is an audience that
cares about what I have to share, and realized my value in sharing my thoughts
and perspective on the trend of disruptive innovation and realistic potential
to drive change in our health ecosystem.
Further inspiration...
After
following all that I do intellectually on latest trends in healthcare
innovation from wearable computing, smart data, and all the latest disruptive
startups in healthcare, it is not until this last week that I was finally in a
caregiver’s shoes. Praying for my father’s suddenly scheduled coronary
procedure to go well, and at the mercy of an archaic hospital system (at one of
the leading heart hospitals in the country) for the best procedure and post
procedure care available in today’s status quo health care system. The
whole experience of my dad being a classic asymptomatic patient who
happened to fortunately go in for a stress test as a routine diagnostic and
discovered to have blockage for a procedure to be done asap, reminded me why I
care so much about meaningful, actionable, proactive, predictive diagnostics
and personalized healthcare solutions for a truly smarter way to manage one's
health as smartly as we can manage our finances.
It
is from this lens (as a Healthcare professional and as a caregiver) that I
will be blogging as I assess the value of various emerging technologies and
their potential impact to drive meaningful needed change (with technology and
the required behavior change) in the larger health ecosystem.
Post 2:
The Value of Wearable Computing Lies in SMART Data:
Personalized Health Insights from Aggregate Data and Driving
Actionable Behavior Change
With
all the buzz generated about the era of BIG DATA, it seems a lot of players (including
entities one wouldn’t expect) are pulling up their seats to the table to figure
out their strategy in the space. And
now, there’s a lot of buzz on BIG Data and Healthcare, underscored by Eric
Topol’s parody video on ‘Show me the Data’.
But I’d argue it’s not enough to just ‘Show me the Data’… rather, tell
me When and Why I should care. The leaders in Big Data in Healthcare will be
those who help inform decisions and behavior change through predictive
analytics from these rich data sets.
I
see the various players in digital health innovation in 3 buckets:
Generating, Analyzing, and Managing Data.
Generating, Analyzing, and Managing Data.
Generating Data for proactive diagnosis
- Bioinformatics,
genomics
- Genome
sequencing
- Quantified
Self Movement: Self tracking devices to measure wellness,
productivity
Analyzing Data: Data
analytics on interpreting data, discovering correlation patterns for
actionable health insights
- Behavioral
analytics (Ginger.io)
- Clinical
analytics (PanGenX)
- Personalized
health intelligence (providing check health engine lights, etc)
- Population
level risk stratification of different groups (valuable for payors and
providers - for proactive diagnostics/ intervention based off certain risk
factors)
Managing Data to Manage
Population Health & Chronic Disease
- Driving
behavior change (at personal, family, employer, and community levels) to
act on the meaningful insights from the Analysis phase: Personalized
Health Management
- Making
Clinical Decision Support more useful and meaningful to physicians to
manage patient health better
- Driving
Automated Medicine with Artificial Intelligence
- Integrating
machine learning algorithms for personalized medicine
The greatest value in Big Data in Healthcare will be in converting
BIG Data to SMART Data --> in the Managing Data vertical to truly
realize the value of the data
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Post 3: The Value of Predictive Diagnostics in Healthcare
Diagnostic tests are integral to a successful health care system, helping inform health care providers and patients need to make key medical decisions. However, today, patients receive correct diagnoses and treatment less than 50% of the time (at first pass) [2].
In
this era, why is it that basic questions on diagnostics elude us?
The answer to the basic healthcare question of “What's wrong with
this person” often remains elusive in the modern era – let alone clear answers
on the most effective treatment for an individual or how we achieve lower costs
and greater efficiency…
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Post 4: The Tipping Point is Now
As
entrepreneurs in health tech pitch their ideas, they are often met with
legitimate questions from various healthcare professionals on why particular
solutions will work today when they haven't worked before. I'd argue there are
a few reasons (era of open information, patient empowerment, govt incentives/
pressure to accelerate data transparency and drive greater focus on outcomes,
and increasing consolidation of healthcare stakeholders). Most importantly, the
time is ripe now to realize the true value of innovation in healthcare.
First
I summarize the evolving healthcare landscape from the perspective of the
various stakeholders in the health ecosystem, and the various startups in
health tech. Second, I'll outline where I believe the greatest potential lies
in healthcare innovation.
Why has true population health management and personalized
healthcare with predictive diagnostics not taken off before?
- Different Data sets collected in solo verticals and in different standards à lack of integrated data sets and interoperability
What's different today that makes the time ripe now for personalized health
management?
- Era of exploding information streams, BIG DATA, and connectivity
- Expanding use of electronic health records (EHRs) and growth of large public biomedical datasets
- Recent technologic advances to work with such big data sets
Opportunities ahead for Big Data:
§Next Generation Clinical
Decision Support Systems: real-time data-driven clinical
decision support, or adaptive decision support
§ Potential for
integration of machine learning algorithms for personalized medicine
§ AI simulation to
approximate optimal clinical decisions
§ Driving
toward automated medicine: Combining autonomous AI with
human clinicians may serve as the most effective long-term
solution. Let humans do what they do well, and let machines do what they
do well (supplemental).
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Post 5: On Personalized Medicine
Personalized genetic informatics
Personalized genetic informatics
