Rock Health Innovation Summit Preps Attendees for a Healthcare Revolution: Part II

Healthcare, writ large, is in need of some serious rethinking. Last week, an afternoon panel at the Rock Health Innovation Summit in San Francisco tackled this subject by stressing the importance of multidisciplinary collaboration and fostering risk taking. (For a recap of what other panelists had to say on the subject in the morning and early afternoon, see “Rock Health Innovation Summit Preps Attendees for a Healthcare Revolution: Part I” and “Famed VC Vinod Khosla on the Death of Medicine as We Know It”.)

“One of the hallmarks of innovation is getting people who don’t know about an issue [together] and see what they come up with,” said Amy Lockwood, the deputy director of the Center for Innovation in Global Health at Stanford's School of Medicine. “The best ideas often come from the people who can pull back and see different possibilities.”

Universities serve a valuable purpose when it comes to innovation in that they promote risk taking, Lockwood said. “The university is the only place you can try things that have almost no success of succeeding. [Universities] are amazing places for entrepreneurs and scientists to play and to partner with,” she added. Research performed at such institutions is based on the pursuit of knowledge. Entrepreneurs partnering with colleges have access to labs, experts, and “an amazing groups of students,” she added. “If I were going to put my dollar on anyone, it would be a freshman at Stanford. There is a resource of students out there who are hungry—and all they want in return is a little to go out on the weekend and the experience.” She later added that she was optimistic for the future of healthcare, stating: “Kids today care in a way that my generation has forgotten.”

The other two panelists, Carmen Puliafito, MD and Atule Butte, MD, PhD, both of which have extensive academic experience themselves expressed similar sentiments. On the topic of collaboration, Puliafito, who is the dean of the Keck School of Medicine at USC explained that “having a crossfunctional team is absolutely crucial for success.” Butte pointed out the value of experimenting and learning about subjects that are out of your core specialty. For instance, Stanford helps its professors become entrepreneurs on the side by offering courses to faculty on topics like getting funding. No stranger to the startup life himself, Butte sees parallels between, for instance, writing a grant application and pitching a product to a venture capitalist. One appeals to guilt and the other greed, he quipped.

Other topics that emerged from the discussion included the importance of thoroughly understanding the patients’ needs. Some of what is described as “innovation” in healthcare strips the human element out of it. “If we are taking the human component out of medicine, I don’t want any part of it,” Lockwood said. This point applies to the global stage as well, where solutions to the world’s most pressing healthcare challenges are often decidedly low-tech. 

Does Design Matter?

The above question was the topic of the next panel discussion, which was a conversation between game designer Jane McGonigal, editor and designer Laura Brunow Miner, and Aenor Sawyer, MD, assistant clinical professor at UCSF.

McGonigal and Sawyer both recounted how important user experience was for them personally as patients. McGonigal recounted how she suffered a traumatic brain injury that left her depressed. To facilitate her recovery, she developed a game called “SuperBetter” inspired by Buffy the Vampire Slayer that empowers players to play an active role in their own recovery. Sawyer told how she had been diagnosed with serious a cancer and “shifted from one side of the white coat to the other.” Through that experience, she realized the value of better understanding the disparate needs across the healthcare ecosystem and to have meaningful information available to the parties within it. “Rather than Big Data in healthcare, I rather have Right Data—pertinent data,” she said. 

An Angel’s Perspective

Closing out the event was a panel on angel investment in digital health from angel investors Esther Dyson, Dave McClure, and David Shaywitz, MD, PhD, who discussed their intent to combine energy, creativity, and capital with the unmet needs in medicine.

A big part of those unmet needs lie in behavior modification. “It is obvious but worth mentioning that a lot of solutions have the end user do something that they don’t want to do or don’t do something that they do want to do.” Actually getting end users to change their behavior in a meaningful way can be a profoundly difficult. In many cases, we often don’t need more data to convince us to change behaviors. We all know, for instance, that exercise is good for us. But many people simply lack the motivation to stick with an exercise regimen. There are new technologies, such as the FitBit, that give people one extra tool to deploy to stay motivated to stay active. But they are better at tracking activity levels than diet, which, of course, is another crucial piece of the healthcare puzzle. “The biggest win to advance healthcare might be a technology that accurately estimates nutritional intake,” Dyson said. “We need a FitBit-like technology for automatically measuring nutritional intake.”

The three panelists observed that tech investors are still leery of investing in healthcare but asked if the caution is warranted. Dyson explained that healthcare is a competitive space, adding: “if there were ten times as many investments [in healthcare], you would probably see nine times as many failures.”

On a related point, Shaywitz pointed out that a major critique of Silicon Valley is its investment in triviality. As a case in point, Rupert Murdoch recently made a visit to the tech hub and posted on Twitter how he found an “[a]mazing sense of entrepreneurship but few new mind blowing innovations.” McClure pointed out that such sentiments are often biased because they often uttered by the wealthy who are in a position to fund such mind-blowing innovations which are nearly always “capital intensive” to address.

 Brian Buntz is the editor-at-large at UBM Canon's medical group. Follow him on Twitter at @brian_buntz.