Tech Tonics

Tech Tonics: Griffin Weber – Bringing Clinical Sense & Sensibility to Healthcare Data Feb 22, 2021

Inspired by health technology from the age of five, Griffin Weber has pursued this passion both doggedly and joyfully. Now an associate professor of medicine and bioinformaticist at Harvard, Griffin spends his days doing what he loves, leveraging technology to pragmatically improve the health and the care of patients.

Griffin grew up in Virginia, the son of a mathematics professor and a professional artist. While his parents had left NYC, they retained their affection for the city, which they expressed through life-size renderings that seem lifted from subway stations – see here.

While many – perhaps most – of our guests describe a career of wandering and exploration, Griffin seems to have had a clear sense of what he wanted to do from the time he was five years old when first inspired by the intersection of human health and cutting-edge technology. He was profoundly interested in understanding “how things worked,” and was especially captivated by the Jarvik-7, the first artificial heart implanted in a patient in December 1982.

In college at Harvard, Griffin pursued bioengineering, but over time found himself ever more intrigued by the power of computers and how they might solve the needs of hospitals. He soon wound up engaged in a series of software projects for hospitals, discovered that he really enjoyed this work, and decided that it was to be the focus of his career. Griffin continued his training at Harvard Medical School in the Health Science and Technology (HST) program and sought to pursue a joint MD/PhD with the PhD in computer science. Initially this confused the administration, who viewed this as a strange combination. But in the end, they promised to support Griffin if he was accepted to the computer science PhD program – which, of course, he was.

It sounds like this worked out pretty well – Griffin was pursuing the joint degree and found his way to a staggering number of high-profile early digital projects which included everything from the management of patient-related information for hospitals to digitizing medical school course information for his colleagues. As he neared the end of medical school, wondering what he might do next, he received an offer he couldn’t refuse. If he was willing to forgo additional medical training (such as an internship, residency, etc.), he was told, he could instead go directly to a faculty position at Harvard Medical School, set up a research lab, and also serve as CTO for the medical school. He said yes.

Quickly, Griffin became immersed in a range of interesting projects and collaborations with a particular focus on the challenges associated with extracting useful information from the electronic health record (EHR). Griffin emphasizes that the EHR is fundamentally a record of physicians and other providers interacting with a patient – rather than a comprehensive record of the patients themselves. This can lead, he says, to “weird biases and misunderstandings” – especially when EHR data is analyzed without the relevant contextual understanding of the practice of medicine, including potentially idiosyncrasies associated with the specific care environment.

Griffin has also found a way to cultivate his artistic side through his work, in his data visualizations. For example, this paper, describing the “Triangle of Biomedicine” presents a graphical depiction of how innovations in basic science translate over time to impact clinical medicine, and this paper, offering the “Tapestry of Big Biomedical Data,” a now-famous illustration showing the relationship between different sources of information about a patient’s health. Notably, Griffin’s interest in data visualization places him in distinguished company – including Florence Nightingale, as David recently discussed in his latest Wall Street Journal book review for Tim Harford’s The Data Detective.

We are inspired by all Griffin has done and continues to do at the frontier of technology and health, and we welcome him to Tech Tonics!

This episode of Tech Tonics is sponsored by Manatt Health. Manatt Health integrates strategic business consulting, public policy acumen, legal excellence and deep analytics capabilities to better serve the complex needs of clients across America’s healthcare system. Together with it’s parent company, Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, the firm’s multidisciplinary team is dedicated to helping its clients across all industries grow and prosper.

Show Notes:
David has written about the challenge of extracting EHR data HERE and HERE.

Tech Tonics: Matt Wilsey, Leading with Grace Feb 08, 2021

Matt Wilsey grew up wanting to serve. He spent his early career in government working for both blue and red administrations, but was eventually lured back to where he grew up–Silicon Valley—to join the tech scene, and helped start and lead several successful tech companies, including Zazzle and CardSpring (sold to Twitter). Along the way Matt did a stint in the New York financial scene, working for leadership at KKR. He considered a return to government, but real life, in the form of a child born with a rare disease, intervened.

Today, Matt Wilsey is CEO of Grace Science, a company that has a laser-like focus on curing a genetic disorder known as NGLY1 Deficiency, which affects about 75 people worldwide – it’s a pretty specific job which arose out a pretty specific experience – the desire to cure his own child, Grace. Despite no training in science or biology and no experience in the pharma world, Matt is driving his company to help all people with NGLY1 find hope for a cure and find each other. He is hell-bent on helping Grace back to health, on helping others fight this insidious disease, and to contribute to the general advancement of biotech discovery for common diseases along the way.

Matt has teamed up with patients, their families, a global array of academic researchers and even a Nobel laureate to achieve his goal; together they see light at the end of the tunnel. Matt expects clinical trials of the drug they have collectively developed to begin within two years and to make a difference not just for future children with this disease, but also his own. We are so thrilled to have Matt on Tech Tonics today!

We are grateful to Manatt Health for sponsoring today’s episode of Tech Tonics. Manatt Health integrates strategic business consulting, public policy acumen, legal excellence and deep analytics capabilities to better serve the complex needs of clients across America’s healthcare system. Together with it’s parent company, Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, the firm’s multidisciplinary team is dedicated to helping its clients across all industries grow and prosper.

Tech Tonics: Amy Emerson and Her Psychedelic Mission Jan 25, 2021

Amy Emerson, CEO of MAPS Public Benefit Corp. (MAPS), grew up in Kodiak, Alaska and fell in love with both animals and science as a child. Later in life, when considering veterinary school, she realized that she loved biology but hated math – she would rather live in the wilderness on a lake and look upon science as a form of art.

Amy’s path led her to a microbiology lab for fish and game, then to bench science at a biotech company where she learned, as she says it, pre-clinical research is “an exercise in proving yourself wrong.” She ultimately switched to the clinical side of biotech research and spent years developing drugs the old fashioned way. For instance, she played a key role in the development of numerous vaccines during a long stint at Chiron starting in its early years.

A chance moment at Burning Man led Amy down a different drug development path. Through a circuitous series of events, she met Rick Doblin, who was doing foundational clinical research into the use of MDMA (aka Ecstasy) for clinical applications. Rick went on to become founder of MAPS, a company intent on bringing the first FDA approved MDMA product to those who suffer from Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other mental health conditions.

Upon hearing Rick speak, Amy felt “a moment of clarity and purpose.” She made a cold call to Rick, volunteering to help with his clinical and regulatory efforts. Today she is CEO of the company. We spoke to Amy about her career, but also the burgeoning field of psychedelic drugs for mental health treatment and the issues around legality, stigma and potential convergence with traditional pharma.

We are grateful to Manatt Health for sponsoring today’s episode of Tech Tonics. Manatt Health integrates strategic business consulting, public policy acumen, legal excellence and deep analytics capabilities to better serve the complex needs of clients across America’s healthcare system. Together with its parent company, Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, the firm’s multidisciplinary team is dedicated to helping its clients across all industries grow and prosper.

Tech Tonics: Stacy Feld – Innovating Where the Consumer Meets Life Sciences Jan 11, 2021

Stacy Feld had settled into a satisfying career in biotech business development when she accidentally found her way into a meeting with Genentech’s CEO and a tiny startup company called 23andMe. The moment sparked a sudden realization that the best life science innovation would be focused around the consumer and a career finding ways to make that prediction real.

Raised on a New Hampshire ranch in a town of 1000 where her parents owned the local video store, Stacy’s original career plan was “to get out of New Hampshire.”

After attending college at Penn, Stacy was pointed towards law school, she attended Vanderbilt to study criminal justice, potentially the legacy of the robbery that sent her parents to New Hampshire from New York in the first place.

After a fortuitously-timed internship opportunity at Wilson Sonsini, a leading Silicon Valley firm during the go go days of the 1990’s tech boom, Stacy became a full time lawyer advising startups that included tech and biotech companies, many of which are now household names. Biotech, in particular, intrigued her, as she was drawn to the way partnerships created value and found herself attracted more to biotech patent licensing than general software licensing.

Stacy eventually left the law firm and went to a startup – a gene expression company in Madison, WI called 3^rd Wave Technology, that was ultimately sold to Hologic. Afterwards she joined Genentech and led business development around small immunology and autoimmune biomarker companies with a focus on filling the Genentech pipeline. Stacy’s Genentech role led her to a fateful breakfast with Linda Avey (co-founder of 23andMe) and subsequently the meeting that drew her attention to consumer-driven healthcare. It was a pivotal moment that ultimately led her to Physic Ventures, which had consumer products company Unilever as a major backer, and a career refocused on the consumer as healthcare purchaser.

Stacy ultimately joined Johnson & Johnson to lead consumer-focused investing and she now leads J&J Innovation activities in the Western US, Australia and New Zealand. Her passion for supporting the small entrepreneur continues to reflect her own 8-year experience running a catering company off the side of her desk while at Genentech, a conduit for her passion for cooking.

We are delighted to welcome Stacy to today’s show!

We are grateful to Manatt Health for sponsoring today’s episode of Tech Tonics. Manatt Health integrates strategic business consulting, public policy acumen, legal excellence and deep analytics capabilities to better serve the complex needs of clients across America’s healthcare system. Together with it’s parent company, Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, the firm’s multidisciplinary team is dedicated to helping its clients across all industries grow and prosper.

Tech Tonics: Takeda’s Ariel Dowling: An Engineer With A Passion For Digital Health Dec 21, 2020

A Jersey girl drawn first captivated by engineering while in college at Dartmouth, Ariel Dowling went on to pursue her PhD at Stanford, exploring the use of wearables to anticipate and prevent knee injuries. After several experiences at tech-focused startups, Ariel has more recently found a home — and a calling — as a digital health leader in biopharma.

Ariel grew up in Basking Ridge, NJ (exit 36 off 78). A good student and a talented lacrosse player, Ariel was strongly drawn to Dartmouth. Once there, she found she loved the community, and especially appreciated their approach to engineering, which she describes as project-based and team oriented; the program was focused, as she explains, on cultivating engineering managers rather than individual contributors.

After completing Dartmouth in four years with two bachelors degrees — she headed off to a PhD in mechanical engineering at Stanford. While the Stanford class was relatively large, she found camaraderie from a group of women engineers who supported and inspired each other.

An avid ultimate frisbee player, Ariel noticed that women seemed to suffer more (non-contact) knee injuries in this sport than men. This ultimately led to her PhD thesis, involving the application of early wearables to injury prevention.

After graduation, Ariel and her husband spent several years in Israel, where she completed a post-doc in robotics. Upon returning to the United States, Ariel’s first job was at a DARPA-funded startup in Boston, which quickly proved to be a decision she regretted. She soon found another job at a fall detection company, and then was poached by an early digital health company, MC-10. This startup stood out to Ariel because it was her first experience at a “really hard-core, VC-backed, growth-focused” company; she took naturally to this environment.

Ultimately, Ariel decided to move on, taking a role in digital health at a biotech company—Cambridge (MA)-based Biogen. She found she enjoyed the challenge, and in short order became (and remains) a much-sought-out thought leader on the digital health speaking circuit. Importantly, Ariel says it was her “keep saying yes” attitude that helped create many of these opportunities.

More recently, Ariel joined Takeda Pharma, also in Cambridge, MA, where she’s a digital strategy leader at the company’s Data Science Institute.

With her combination of vision, expertise, passion, and optimism, Ariel offers an inspiring portrait of the future of digital and data in pharma. We are delighted to welcome her today’s show!

We are grateful to Manatt Health for sponsoring today’s episode of Tech Tonics. Manatt Health integrates strategic business consulting, public policy acumen, legal excellence and deep analytics capabilities to better serve the complex needs of clients across America’s healthcare system. Together with it’s parent company, Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, the firm’s multidisciplinary team is dedicated to helping its clients across all industries grow and prosper.

Tech Tonics: Paul Bleicher – Physician, Scientist, Entrepreneur, Innovator Dec 07, 2020

A self-described “nerdy” kid from a working class family in a bedroom community of “The City,” on the South Shore of Long Island, Paul Bleicher trained as a physician-scientist, and was heading towards a career in academic medicine when he boldly decided to pivot to industry, where he’s enjoyed a remarkable and storied career in a range of large and small organizations, often very different, but sharing a focus on collecting and using data.

Like David Kessler, Harvey Milk and Stan Lee, our guest, Paul Bleicher grew up in the Five Towns on Long Island, depicted – he points out — in the movie GoodFellas, Thomas Pynchon’s novel, V, and the TV show, Entourage. Paul describes himself as a “late 60’s amalgamation of mathlete and hippie-wannabee with high school-educated parents,” and says he was inspired at a young age by books like Arrowsmith and Microbe Hunters to become a physician-scientist.

Paul studied biology at RPI, attended a transformative summer program in cell physiology at Wood’s Hole, and ultimately was accepted into the MD/PhD program at the University of Rochester, where he pursued his PhD in immunology, and on the medical side, learned about George Engel’s biopsychosocial model of illness, emphasizing the importance of social and environmental factors as well as genetic and biological.

In Boston, at Harvard Medical School, Paul continued his training via a residency in internal medicine then specializing in dermatology, and pursued a post-doc in molecular immunology. This research resulted in a number of high-profile publications, and a plum job as a physician-scientist at MGH.

After a few years on the HMS faculty, Paul took his career in a bold new direction. Inspired in part by his scientist-wife, who had joined one of the earliest immunology-focused biotech startups in Boston, Paul was motivated to pursue his interest in translation in the private sector, and gained valuable experience first at an early CRO, and then at an early-stage biotech.

He then founded an innovative pharma IT company called Phase Forward, and began a thirteen year journey with the company, which was ultimately acquired by Oracle. Paul then joined an early stage innovative health data company, Humedica, which was acquired by Optum, part of the UnitedHealth Group (as David discussed here) in 2013. Paul stayed on at Optum for six years, serving for most of that time as the founding CEO of the analytics and innovation collaborative OptumLabs, until spring 2020.

Paul attributes his success to his “hands on” approach, able to understand both the overarching aims and the underlying details. He is an inventor on six issued patents on health and pharma IT inventions, and initiated a numbers of major projects in area like deep learning, network analysis, machine learning, etc., typically contributing his own R code.

An éminence grise at the intersection of pharma and data, Paul advises numerous companies and investors and serves on a number of boards. We are delighted to welcome him to our show today!

Tech Tonics: Dr. Sally Shaywitz: Advancing Science, Driving Policy, Overcoming Dyslexia Nov 23, 2020

Dr. Sally Shaywitz – Yes, she is David’s mom – has brought an entrepreneur’s mindset to her life’s work in dyslexia, recognizing the condition as a prevalent and underappreciated need, then working tirelessly to advance the science and enact the policy required to fully unlock the potential within so many brilliant individuals. Sally has helped a huge array of individuals access what she has famously termed their “sea of strengths”.

The daughter of two immigrants who had escaped Eastern Europe at the turn of the century and arrived in America in search of a better life, Sally was born and grew up up in the Bronx, New York. The family wasn’t well-off: her father was a dressmaker, her mom, a homemaker. Yet she describes her childhood, with her parents and older sister, Irene, as “overflowing with love.”

Sally attended college at the City College of New York (CCNY), and after initially contemplating a career in law, found herself drawn to medicine, and was accepted early into the medical school of her choice, Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Tragically, the same year, Sally’s mom was afflicted with endometrial cancer, and despite what initially seemed like an encouraging prognosis, she grew progressively ill and ultimately passed away, a particularly devastating experience given the family’s especially close emotional bonds.

While entering medical school with a heavy heart, Sally soon found she resonated with what she describes as the humanity and warmth of medicine; she was especially drawn to pediatrics, pursuing it herself and marrying a pediatrician, Bennett Shaywitz, she met the summer after her first year of medical school.

While Sally was one of only four women in a class of 100, she generally found the men to be far friendlier; similarly, during her pediatrics training. When she wanted to organize her schedule so she could take time off to be with her first child, it was her female colleagues, she said, who resisted and rejected the idea.

After completing her training in pediatrics and a fellowship in developmental pediatrics, Sally and her family – now with three children – moved to Dayton, OH, where her husband had been assigned by the Air Force to run a research center during the Vietnam War. Sally decided she wanted to focus on her children, and put her career on hold. She loved the experience, and wrote about it for the New York Times Sunday Magazine, focusing on the contrast between, as she describes it, what “enlightened women” were taught about motherhood and how, in her experience, it was so much more instinctive, positive and fulfilling.

The family subsequently relocated to suburban Connecticut after Bennett accepted a position at Yale Medical School. Sally says she initially planned to be a stay-at-home mom, but found the available social environment intellectually deadening. She began to see patients out of her home – an experience she wrote up for Ms. Magazine – and was soon recruited by Yale to care for the learning disorder patients that apparently no one else was interested in seeing. The field was viewed at the time as a bit of a backwater (the starting point of so many entrepreneurial journeys!), but Sally found she really enjoyed taking care of patients with dyslexia, and was determined to drive their care forward. This mission would come to define Sally’s career (and soon, Bennett’s as well, as they began to work as a team), starting with a transformative longitudinal study (now in its 37th year, and counting!) that evolved into an extensive clinical research program. Their research revealed that dyslexia was surprisingly common – affecting about 20% of the population – and that it doesn’t spontaneously regress with age.

Sally developed what’s now commonly called the “sea of strengths” model, which describes dyslexia as a localized deficit in the way language is processed, so reading takes longer. It is a problem often seen in children with tremendous strengths; thus, it becomes particularly important to evaluate dyslexics on what they do know – their reasoning ability, say – and not to mistakenly undervalue their potential simply because they are slow readers. Accommodations such as additional time for tests can prove transformative in allowing a dyslexic’s intrinsic ability to be revealed and meaningfully assessed.

As a consequence of impact of this research, Sally and Bennett achieved exceptional academic success – both are endowed professors at Yale Medical School, elected members of the National Academy of Medicine, and have led many NIH grants and program projects. Yet – like many entrepreneurs — they were also determined to drive the science into palpable change, in this case for dyslexic students and their families. Together they co-founded the Yale Center for Dyslexia & Creativity and have relentlessly focused not only on advancing the research, but also on ensuring the knowledge finds expression in public policy. They frequently testify before Congress and state legislatures, for example.

In 2003, Sally summarized her learnings in her best-selling book, Overcoming Dyslexia; earlier this year, she released a completely-revised and updated second edition, which has been similarly well-received.

We are grateful to Manatt Health for sponsoring today’s episode of Tech Tonics. Manatt Health integrates strategic business consulting, public policy acumen, legal excellence and deep analytics capabilities to better serve the complex needs of clients across America’s healthcare system. Together with it’s parent company, Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, the firm’s multidisciplinary team is dedicated to helping its clients across all industries grow and prosper.

Show Notes:

“Catch-22 For Mothers” – by Sally Shaywitz, New York Times Sunday Magazine, March 4, 1973

Yale Center for Dyslexia & Creativity (YCDC)

“Success Stories” – profiles of exceptional dyslexics, from YCDC site

“The Couple Who Helped Decode Dyslexia” by Katie Hafner, New York Times, September 21, 2018

“Test Early To Detect Dyslexia – Our Children Deserve Nothing Less” by Ruben Navarrette Jr., Washington Post Writer’s Group (syndicated column, October 2020).

Overcoming Dyslexia, 2nd Edition (Knopf, 2020)

About the Yale Dyslexia panel – 2015 – featuring Ari Emanuel, Diane Swonk, Brian Grazer, Toby Cosgrove, David Boies, with remarks by Senators Chris Murphy (D-CT) and Bill Cassidy (R-LA), and by Valerie Jarrett.

Tech Tonics: Matthew Zachary – Making Noise and Making a Difference that is Music to Patient’s Ears Nov 09, 2020

Matthew Zachary, CEO of Offscrip Media has had multiple careers despite the fact that he shouldn’t have had any. He had studied to be a concert pianist and composer and conductor through college, but at the age of 21, on his way to study in a USC graduate music program with Hans Zimmer, he was diagnosed with a rare brain cancer and told he had 6 months to live. That was in 1995.

Matthew credits his uncle, a geneticist, with saving his life, serving as his medical “Sherpa” and helping him “having the chutzpah to challenge established treatment.” But his healthcare experience, and especially the 6 years it took to recover his immune system post-treatment, made clear to him that young patients weren’t getting the information they needed nor the support required to thrive after a medical crisis.

Matthew had a thriving media career when a chance meeting of another recovered patient who had the same brain cancer led him to realize that there was a vast gap between patients’ need for knowledge and community and the system’s ability to deliver it. He founded Stupid Cancer in 2006 to help fill this gap, focused especially on helping young people who had survived cancer and were seeking to live out life as normally as possible. During the 12 years he led the organization, every health tech company focused on cancer knocked on Matthew’s door; it led him to the realization that entrepreneurs, by and large, just don’t understand how to build for or reach the right people to ensure their offering makes sense.

Matthew has a special beef with how Silicon Valley thinks about healthcare, feeling that the culture leads to building the wrong things for the wrong people. And he further thinks that venture investors don’t care enough to invest in the right things most of the time. As such, Matthew is firm believer in the essential role of peer to peer care and the importance of life hacks, especially when the traditional delivery system doesn’t provide the answers. It is his view that for-profit companies can’t address cancer in an interesting way unless it stops being profit driven, though he recognizes the limitations of the not-for-profit sector as well.

Join us for this fun show where we talk to Matthew about his long career in and around healthtech and media – he had the first healthcare-related radio show and interviewed 2000 people over 14 years. He was also the first speaker (and piano player) at the inaugural Health2.0 Conference. We talk to him about what it’s like to see healthtech having its moment, what led to the formation of Stupid Cancer and what it was like to turn the organization over to others, and his new initiative, OffScrip Media, which has reconnected him with his love of being behind the microphone and which is billed as, “a podcast that calls out all sorts of stupid BS in healthcare through raw conversations about advocacy, heroism, and the audacity of health.”

We are grateful to Manatt Health for sponsoring today’s episode of Tech Tonics. Manatt Health integrates strategic business consulting, public policy acumen, legal excellence and deep analytics capabilities to better serve the complex needs of clients across America’s healthcare system. Together with it’s parent company, Manatt, Phelps & Phillips the firm’s multidisciplinary team is dedicated to helping its clients across all industries grow and prosper.

Show Notes:
Matthew composed and plays Simplicity, his favorite of his own works.

Tech Tonics: Kevin Lyman – From Halo to CEO Oct 26, 2020

Kevin Lyman was once the world’s highest ranked Warlock in Worlds of Warcraft and a professional Halo2 player. But that wasn’t his original plan. In fact, growing up in New Jersey, Kevin always wanted to be a scientist, even before he was sure of what that meant.

While a student at Renselaer Polytechnic, Kevin took a number of jobs, including toy designer at Hasbro, sensor designer on the Falcon rocket for SpaceX and on the Excel team at Microsoft. But it was his first full time job as an engineer at Enlitic in 2015 that made him realize he wanted to apply his scientific ingenuity to healthcare, a field that he views as one of the few where you can help do something that really helps people.

Enlitic took a number oof twists and turns as it built its imaging analytics products, and when those roads came back together as a result of his leadership, Kevin became the CEO in 2018. Kevin talks about what it’s like to be an under-30 CEO, the good and the bad of AI, and how one effectively balances intuition with the logical model inherent in an AI-focused company. He also talks about his current creative outlet – drawing – a sample of which you can see in evidence behind him in his photo.
We were delighted to have Kevin on the show.

We are grateful to Manatt Health for sponsoring today’s episode of Tech Tonics. Manatt Health integrates strategic business consulting, public policy acumen, legal excellence and deep analytics capabilities to better serve the complex needs of clients across America’s healthcare system. Together with its parent company, Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, the firm’s multidisciplinary team is dedicated to helping its clients across all industries grow and prosper.

Tech Tonics: Diana Brainard – A Passion for Patients, A Talent for Leadership Oct 12, 2020

Diana Brainard’s passion for understanding our stories and experiences initially led her to study comparative literature in college; but sometime during her junior year abroad in Lyon, she realized she could pursue her passion through medicine, a journey that’s taken her from academic infectious diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital through her current role as Senior Vice President and head of virology at Gilead Sciences.

Born in Chicago, Diana’s family moved to Brooklyn when she was one, then to the Connecticut suburbs when she was seven. A precocious student, she skipped an early grade, found she loved the Montesorri school she attended in New York, but grew bored once she started school in Connecticut. All this changed when she found her way to Hotchkiss Boarding School in 10^th grade, and felt as if her mind was awakened – in large measure, she says, because of a number of exceptional teachers. A former tennis player, she picked up squash, and was subsequently recruited by colleges for her skill (and would later become an “academic all-Ivy selection” for her abilities as both student and athlete).

Like so many other Tech Tonics guests – including Zak Kohane, Atul Butte, and Ken Mandl — Diana attended Brown, and enthusiastically dove into advanced classes in a range of subjects. The humanities, with its intimate seminars and engaged teachers, proved especially appealing, so she majored in comparative literature and late elected to spent her Junior Year abroad in France. Diana started to envision a future in graduate school, and then perhaps as a literature professor.

To her surprise and disappointment, Diana’s experience in France left her disillusioned and she found herself drawn, through literature, into medicine. She was moved by Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, and by the poetry of Williams Carlos Williams, and soon she began a correspondence with Harvard physician and author Robert Coles. Diana ultimately applied to medical school, and attended Tulane, in New Orleans.

Diana loved both the city and the medical school experience – in particular, the amount of responsibility students were afforded during the clinical rotations at the famed Charity Hospital. She found a similar sense of responsibility at Massachusetts General Hospital, where she continued her training, first in internal medicine (including a month taking care of patients at an understaffed clinic in Haiti), and ultimately specializing in infectious diseases.

Diana’s interest in HIV in particular led her to noted physician-scientist Bruce Walker, under whose guidance she conducted complex translational research (studying HIV in mice she reconstituted with human immune cells). She also helped set up a HIV research facility at the Nelson Mandela School of Medicine in Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa.

Though initially contemplating a career in academic infectious diseases, and having earned a competitive K-08 NIH grant to support her efforts, she surprised many of her colleagues by deciding to join Merck, and focus on drug development. Almost immediately, it seems, she knew she made the right decision, as she found herself surrounded by smart and talented colleagues who, like her, seemed to enjoy functioning in a culture that prized collaboration and multidisciplinary team effort rather than personal recognition.

Diana’s career surged ahead at Merck, and she soon found herself with an opportunity to join an exciting clinical development team that luminary John McHutchison was just starting to assemble at Gilead, in California; she took it. Good call; Diana would serve as the clinical lead for the breakthrough hepatitis C product, Sovaldi, was one of three people at the company to present it to the FDA. Sovaldi turned out to be as transformative as anticipated and Diana would go on to lead the development and subsequent approval of several additional hepatitis C products. In 2018, she was elevated to SVP of HIV and Emerging Viruses, and her remit was expanded to include hepatitis B and C, and retitled Virology. Just when it seemed like things couldn’t get busier, SARS-CoV-2 came along, and with it, her leadership of an explosive amount of clinical research around the Gilead product, remdesivir (Veklury). It’s been a busy year.

Full-disclosure: Diana is also David Shaywitz’s wife – which is not only why we were able to book her, but also why we are especially delighted to welcome her to our show!

We are grateful to Manatt Health for sponsoring today’s episode of Tech Tonics. Manatt Health integrates strategic business consulting, public policy acumen, legal excellence and deep analytics capabilities to better serve the complex needs of clients across America’s healthcare system. Together with its parent company, Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, the firm’s multidisciplinary team is dedicated to helping its clients across all industries grow and prosper.

Tech Tonics: Geeta Nayyar, Executive Medical Director, Salesforce Sep 28, 2020

Geeta Nayyar started off wanting to be a teacher, but then decided “science is the answer to everything” and became a doctor. Today she is the recently-appointed Executive Medical Director at Salesforce and gets to do both, which is her dream come to life.

Geeta’s parents were both MDs and her two brothers are both in the healthcare field (and one is in medical school as a start to a 2nd career), so becoming a doctor was somewhat pre-ordained. She started her own medical training at the age of 17 and continued to fall in love with science, though soon encompassed healthcare IT into her definition of the field.

While believing that “science is the answer to everything, even emotion,” Geeta decided to get an MBA after watching the business of healthcare fail patients who needed so much more than what was traditionally provided. While there,

she observed the roll-out of the hospital’s first electronic medical record system and became enamored by the potential for technology to change medicine. This lead to becoming one of the first chief medical officers in a tech company, AT&T. But it was a role ahead of its time.

Geeta went on to spend time at a startup, at a physician organization and at Greenway, the EMR company, and now has found her way back to a large tech company targeting healthcare: Salesforce. But this time, she feels like a real difference can be made, especially in light of the pandemic, noting that her parents, now in their 70s and still practicing physicians, are performing virtual visits.

A recognized force of nature in health IT, we are so happy to welcome Geeta to the show.

We are grateful to Manatt Health for sponsoring today’s episode of Tech Tonics. Manatt Health integrates strategic business consulting, public policy acumen, legal excellence and deep analytics capabilities to better serve the complex needs of clients across America’s healthcare system. Together with it’s parent company, Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, the firm’s multidisciplinary team is dedicated to helping its clients across all industries grow and prosper.

Tech Tonics: Dr. Ken Mandl – Forging Connection Through Technology Sep 14, 2020

Ken Mandl has a gift for listening to other people, whether they’re mentors offering the advice that shaped his career in pediatrics and informatics at Boston’s Children Hospital and Harvard Medical School, or helping physicians and patients learn from each other by making it easier for them to share information. He’s a pioneering leader of a long-anticipated era whose time, it seems, has finally arrived.

The son of a physicist and an English professor, Ken Mandl’s family settled in the Boston area when he was five and, except for a brief college detour to Providence, he’s been shoveling winter snow there ever since.

A biology and psychology major at Brown, Ken expected to study child psychology but was drawn toward med school by a conspicuously intense premed roommate (who apparently hadn’t received the Brown memo…). Presumably recognizing the value of competitive peers in raising his game, Ken then matriculated at Harvard Medical School, arriving at a particularly auspicious time. He was a member of the first class of a bold new medical education program called “New Pathway,” featuring small-group learning led by luminaries such as (in Ken’s case) legendary surgeon-innovator Judah Folkman (see here).

Ken’s training continued in pediatrics and emergency medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital. While and ER doctor there, he appeared as a prosecution witness (for a tragic case of “shaken baby syndrome”) on one of the earliest Court TV cases, where he was cross-examined by noted defense attorney Barry Scheck.

While Ken’s student research experience was in traditional molecular biology, he found himself drawn to an intriguing new program focused on clinical effectiveness. After receiving some particularly wise counsel from noted Harvard physician-scientist Howard Hiatt (who Ken describes as “a gentleman and a scholar”), Ken connected with Dr. Troy Brennan (now Chief Medical Officer of CVS Health), and embarked on a fascinating research project looking at the impact of maternal length-of-stay on obstetrics outcomes, which led to some intriguing (if initially controversial) publications.

Ken then joined forces professionally with his friend (and previous Tech Tonics guest) Dr. Zak Kohane, who had recently founded a pioneering informatics program at Boston Children’s Hospital. Ken recognized an important opportunity at the intersection of technology, clinical medicine and population health. While initially struggling for funding given the novelty of the field – in fact, his grants would be critiqued simultaneously as proposing research that “can’t be done” and which “had already been done by the dot coms.” Nevertheless, his research soon gained traction and his career took off.

Today, a Professor of Pediatrics and Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School, Ken directs the Computational Health Informatics Program at Boston Children’s Hospital. He is a founder of modern approaches to biosurveillance and is perhaps best known for his work and leadership driving the development of an “app store model for health IT innovation” SMART on FHIR – an initiative David described several years ago Forbesas “our last, best hope for interoperability.”

We are grateful to Manatt Health for sponsoring today’s episode of Tech Tonics. Manatt Health integrates strategic business consulting, public policy acumen, legal excellence and deep analytics capabilities to better serve the complex needs of clients across America’s healthcare system. Together with it’s parent company, Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, the firm’s multidisciplinary team is dedicated to helping its clients across all industries grow and prosper.

Show notes:
David’s Astounding HealthTech column for Timmerman Report on the recent Duke real world evidence conference – “Closing medicine’s feedback gap: Can tech help integrate clinical care and clinical research?”

David’s related 2019 commentary in Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics – “A Drug Is not an Outcome: Extending Translation Through Implementation Using Real-World Data”

Tech Tonics: John Groetelaars – Connecting MedTech to the Digital World Aug 24, 2020

John Groetelaars learned to work with his hands on his family’s vegetable farm, but he realized early that he was more interested in using those hands to build motorcycles and mechanical devices.

He followed his inclination first by helping manufacture engines and axles after earning his engineering degree through the GM Institute; he later transferred to the GM’s Chevy Lumina factory. The auto industry was very resistant to change, but John early on recognized the importance of designing for the customer and decided to broaden his skills earning his MBA at Columbia University. His first landing point post MBA – at Eli Lilly and then it’s Guidant spin-out—launched his medical device career and he has never looked back.

Many of the Guidant alums from that time went on to become giants of the medical device industry and John is no exception. He had successful stints in the U.S. and globally at Ventrica, Bard and Boston Scientific before being named CEO of Hill-Rom, a public, Fortune 1000 medical device company that is navigating it’s way across the digital and data realm.

The healthcare world has gone digital one segment at a time, with medical device companies holding up the end of the parade. Despite what looked like a traditional medtech career, John has pushed Hill Rom to step out in front of the band and right from the start, and set his sights toward re-defining the medical device giant as a connected health company. On the heels of Hill-Rom’s merger with Welch-Allyn and a string of digital health acquisitions, such as that ofVoalte, John is always seeking to find the right investment balance between the company’s medical device history and its digital future.

In our discussion John discusses the importance of thinking beyond what’s always been done and the interesting new challenges faced by first-time CEOs, even those with significant management experience. As a leader with a remarkably gender-diverse management team and board of directors, he also discusses why he believes that meaningful commitment to diversity makes companies perform more effectively.

We are delighted that John could join us on Tech Tonics!

We are grateful to Manatt Health for sponsoring today’s episode of Tech Tonics. Manatt Health integrates strategic business consulting, public policy acumen, legal excellence and deep analytics capabilities to better serve the complex needs of clients across America’s healthcare system. Together with it’s parent company, Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, the firm’s multidisciplinary team is dedicated to helping its clients across all industries grow and prosper.

Tech Tonics: Andrew Trister – From Jersey Boy to Digital Doc Aug 10, 2020

With a knack for engineering and a passion for patients, Andrew Trister career has taken this Jersey boy from radiation oncology to Apple to his current role at the Gates Foundation, where he’s spearheading their efforts to leverage technology to improve the health of people around the world.

Andrew – like E Street drummer Max Weinberg — grew up in the lovely North Jersey town of Maplewood, and like Weinberg’s, Andrew’s family was also originally from Eastern Europe and had left to escape persecution (though Weinberg’s family immigrated to the United States several generations earlier).

Growing up, Andrew shared the complex experience of many children of immigrants; he says he felt “like an American” within the context of his family, where Romanian, not English, was the first language, but a bit like an outsider among his classmates and neighbors.

Inspired by his father (who at one point had started to train as a doctor) and an uncle, who was an engineer, Andrew was drawn to this interface; his interest in becoming a doctor took on a greater sense of urgency following the tragic death of a young cousin from a devastating brain tumor.

Always working at the intersection of disciplines, Andrew pursued both engineering and pre-med subjects in college at the University of Pennsylvania, and stayed at Penn for his MD/PhD. His graduate work encompassed both bioengineering and machine learning (presumably before at least one of those disciplines was cool….) He was increasingly gripped by the idea of using technology to improve patient care.

He continued his training, in radiation oncology, at the University of Washington, where his career was profoundly impacted by relationships with two polymath, intellectually unfettered mentors: Dr. Mark Groudine and Dr. Stephen Friend.

Working with Friend, who was at the time just putting together the open science platform known as Sage Bionetworks (David, incidentally, was a founding advisor of Sage), Andrew became increasingly interested in the possibilities of using wearables to better understand phenotypes, and to advance patient-centric health.

Apple, it turned out, was also developing an interest in this space, and Andrew and Stephen would ultimately join Apple for several years to advance their health-focused initiatives.

More recently, Andrew returned to Seattle for what seems like the perfect role for him: driving digital health technologies for the Gates Foundation – an effort that, as he discusses, has placed him squarely in the epicenter of a range of COVID-19-related efforts. It’s a challenge worthy of his exceptional talents.

We are grateful to Andrew for joining us today on Tech Tonics!

We are grateful to Manatt Health for sponsoring today’s episode of Tech Tonics. Manatt Health integrates strategic business consulting, public policy acumen, legal excellence and deep analytics capabilities to better serve the complex needs of clients across America’s healthcare system. Together with its parent company, Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, the firm’s multidisciplinary team is dedicated to helping clients across all industries grow and prosper.

Tech Tonics: Jill Hagenkord’s Wild Ride Jul 27, 2020

Growing up in a small town in Iowa, Jill Hagenkord never imagined herself as a doctor, or scientist, or entrepreneur – yet she became all three, blazing her own path and charting for herself a captivating personal and professional journey.

Jill’s childhood was especially difficult; her parents divorced when she was ten, leaving Jill and her siblings struggling to get by, relying on subsidies for both goods and housing. She describes herself as a rebellious student who was secretly good at school, and says she went to college to pursue her interest in “cute boys and fun parties.” She attended the University of Iowa.

At college, she worked 2-3 jobs, did really well, and “partied all the time.” Her ultimate career direction would be strongly influenced by a “terrible boyfriend” – a guy who, she said, constantly told her she “wasn’t smart enough to succeed in science classes or get into medical school.” It motivated her to prove him wrong, which she did, time and again, ultimately earning admission to the Stanford MD/PhD program.

Jill moved to the Bay Area but lived in San Francisco, not Palo Alto, worked at a bar, and spent as little time in class as possible, while nevertheless mastering all the material. She dropped the PhD part of the training and pursued a residency in pathology at UCSF, but then got drawn into the startup world; while there, she served as a mouse pathologist at a buzzy startup that ultimately IPO’d.

Jill initially returned to Iowa to finish her pathology residency, with the plan to settle down and become a “normal” pathologist there, but discovered that she missed the innovation culture she had known in California. So, off she went to University of Pittsburgh, to pursue not one, but two ultra-specialized fellowships (in molecular genetic pathology and pathology/oncology informatics), then returned to the Bay Area to serve in a series of Chief Medical Officer roles, including, most significantly, a role at 23andMe right after they received a highly-publicized warning letter from the FDA. With her help, the company got itself back into the Agency’s good graces; ultimately, Jill was able to sell her shares, and realize a significant return.

After a brief period as a medical consultant in the health tech industry, Jill has just started at Optum as Chief Medical Officer of its new Genomics team. She is thinking about living in Iowa.

We are grateful to Manatt Health for sponsoring today’s episode of Tech Tonics. Manatt Health integrates strategic business consulting, public policy acumen, legal excellence and deep analytics capabilities to better serve the complex needs of clients across America’s healthcare system. Together with its parent company, Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, the firm’s multidisciplinary team is dedicated to helping clients across all industries grow and prosper.

Tech Tonics: Arnaub Chatterjee – Making Healthcare Smart Jul 13, 2020

Arnaub Chatterjee comes from a long line of physicians, and in his youth, assumed he’d follow the family tradition. At college at the University of Michigan, he pursued a well-traveled path towards medicine, graduating with a degree in cell and molecular biology. But then his heart wandered, and ultimately he found himself having a difficult conversation with his parents. Fortunately, he assures us, his younger sister eventually became a physician, much to his parents’ delight — and relief.

Arnaub, meanwhile, pursued an interest at the intersection of the business and policy aspects of healthcare, working for an HMO one summer, a physicians group supporting a national healthcare plan the next, and at https://www.samhsa.gov/within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services the summer after that, focused on mental health.

He continued his training at Cornell, pursuing an intense dual degree program focused on health policy and healthcare administration – his fellow alums include previous Tech Tonics guest Nancy Schlichting, and also former Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini. Upon graduation, Arnaub pursued healthcare consulting at Deloitte, then left to work in the Obama administration.

After initially working in a division focused on Medicare fraud, his life changed when he happened to hear a talk by legendary healthcare innovator and entrepreneur Todd Park. He soon joined Todd and the remarkable group that was around him working to change the way technology could impact health and health policy. Arnaub helped launch healthdata.gov, established the first cohort of the Innovation Fellows program within government and co-authored one of the seminal whitepapers on big data in healthcare with colleagues at McKinsey. Not only was the work interesting, he says, but the relationships he formed shaped the future trajectory of his career.

Arnaub’s first post-government role was in health technology at Merck, where he had been recruited by former colleague (and previous Tech Tonics guest) Sachin Jain; Jain had recently left D.C. for Merck and invited Arnaub to join him. There, Arnaub focused on some of the earliest efforts to introduce real word data into Merck’s clincial evidence and data science strategy. Following his time at Merck, he then reconnected with colleagues at McKinsey where he continued to focus on R&D strategy and data science, serving both biopharma and the major technology companies who were entering the healthcare industry.

After a McKinsey colleague, Sastry Chilukuri, left to pursue some of these concepts at Medidata – specifically, to develop Medidata’s data science entity, Acorn AI – Arnaub joined him. Today, he serves as the SVP of Product, where he oversees all strategy and go-to-market over products such as synthetic control arms, trial design, imaging analytics and the company’s work in the ‘omics space.

We are grateful to Manatt Health for sponsoring today’s episode of Tech Tonics. Manatt Health integrates strategic business consulting, public policy acumen, legal excellence and deep analytics capabilities to better serve the complex needs of clients across America’s healthcare system. Together with its parent company, Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, the firm’s multidisciplinary team is dedicated to helping clients across all industries grow and prosper.

Tech Tonics: Making It Happen – Madeline Bell, CEO, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Jun 22, 2020

Madeline Bell is one of those people who decides what they want and does what it takes to make it happen. She grew up wanting to be a nurse, wanting to work with children and ultimately deciding she wanted to lead. She has achieved all three of these things and so much more.

Today Madeline is one of America’s few female hospital CEO’s, leading Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, the nation’s first hospital devoted exclusively to the care of children. She is one of the 13% of female CEOs in healthcare and she is committed to driving that number upwards, saying, “If we want the face of leadership to change, women have to make it happen.”

Madeline always wanted to work in healthcare, though her original plan was to be a nurse. She got her first such role working in a nursing home at age 15 and realized that she wanted to invest her energy in children, where there was more hope for their future. She went to nursing school at Villanova and took her first full time nursing job at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in 1983, never knowing she would one day return to as its leader.

After returning to school to study organizational dynamics, Madeline took her first hospital administration job at a very entrepreneurial system, Mainline Health, channeling her two entrepreneurial parents. She was ultimately lured back to CHoP as Chief Operating Officer and was elevated to CEO eight years later where she learned how different that job is, particularly when it comes to being the face of the brand.

Madeline talks about how her transition to CEO was questioned both because she was a nurse and a woman, but ultimately her success has demonstrated why her background made her particularly effective in her role. She has developed a passion for encouraging other women to seek leadership roles and has her own blog called Heels of Success focused on this topic. She also hosts a podcast, Breaking Through with Madeline Bell, focused on the amazing innovatioons, such as Spark Therapeutics, that emanate from CHoP.

While Madeline loves her work and her family, which includes 7 children (!), her real passion is the Philadelphia Eagles, having spent her entire life living in Pennsylvania. We loved having Madeline on Tech Tonics!

We are grateful to Manatt Health for sponsoring today’s episode of Tech Tonics. Manatt Health integrates strategic business consulting, public policy acumen, legal excellence and deep analytics capabilities to better serve the complex needs of clients across America’s healthcare system. Together with it’s parent company, Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, the firm’s multidisciplinary team is dedicated to helping clients across all industries grow and prosper.

Heels of Success (Madeline’s blog)

Breaking Through with Madeline Bell (Madeline’s podcast)

Tech Tonics: Patrick Hines – Helping People is in His DNA Jun 08, 2020

Since March 23, 2020, Dr. Patrick Hines, physician, scientist and entrepreneur has spent most of his time between the Detroit Children’s Hospital and a nearby hotel room, where he stays to minimize COVID-19 risk to his family. He occasionally drops by to participate in movie night from a backyard chair while his wife and kids stay inside on the sofa. But Patrick is undaunted by this, saying that helping people is in his DNA. From very humble beginnings in North Carolina, Patrick watched his parents, both teachers, mentor poor rural kids at school and at home; it inspired in him the desire to give back.

Patrick’s dad, a classically-trained baritone, accomplished singer, and choir director at the local college, was also his musical role model. Patrick made his way through college on a music scholarship, playing French horn and trumpet. But all the while, he was drawn to science. Having majored in chemistry at Hampton University, a historically black college in Virginia, Patrick set off to get his PhD but soon realized that research wasn’t enough of a people profession to satisfy his desire to serve. So off he went to medical school at UNC Chapel Hill, where he had the good fortune to meet his clinical mentor and learn about the vastly undeserved clinical needs of people with sickle cell disease.

Patrick, now a PhD and MD, ultimately trained to become a pediatric intensive care physician. He worked first at Children’s Hospital of Philadephia (CHoP) and later at Detroit Children’s Hospital, but he also founded Functional Fluidics, a company that focuses on red blood cell health generally and sickle cell anemia diagnostics specifically. The idea for the company came from his recognition that therapeutics to treat the condition kept failing clinical trials because there was no surrogate endpoint and that he could bring a solution to this problem and to patients who had so few treatment options.

Patrick is now in the process of transitioning out of his regular ICU role to dedicate himself full-time to his young, growing company. Patrick speaks on the podcast about his difficulty raising money as a black founder and how these experiences were even more challenging than some of the prejudice he has faced as a black physician. Given our current discourse on race in America, it is an eye-opening first person account of how someone with significant intellect, experience, and education can come up against the limitations of others’ small thinking. But despite those that have told him his efforts were less than, Patrick has made it pretty clear that he is not giving up – he sees his work as a lifeline to people and intends to live out the helping gene passed on from his parents. Says Patrick, “It is my responsibility to be sure people with sickle cell matter and to get them the medical resources they need.”

Patrick has also returned to music, singing publicly with his dad for the very first time last year. As an avid jazz enthusiast (see below for his favorite song) he is excited to be back around music. And he is especially glad to be leaving his pandemic-driven hotel stay and returning to his family for the everyday hugs, skirmishes and all of the things that were once annoying and are now a joy to experience. Welcome home Patrick and thanks for being on the show!

We are grateful to Manatt Health for sponsoring today’s episode of Tech Tonics. Manatt Health integrates strategic business consulting, public policy acumen, legal excellence and deep analytics capabilities to better serve the complex needs of clients across America’s healthcare system. Together with it’s parent company, Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, the firm’s multidisciplinary team is dedicated to helping clients across all industries grow and prosper.

Tech Tonics: Craig Lipset – Patient-Centric Before It Was Cool May 18, 2020

As a boy, Craig Lipset thought he wanted to become a doctor – but over time, he came to appreciate that his real interest was, as he put it, engaging in the spirit of medicine at the population level – a pursuit that ultimately brought him to the forefront of digital health at Pfizer, establishing a capability long before most pharmas even recognized they needed it.

Craig grew up in the distinct cultural milieu that is the North Shore of Long Island. A middle child with an interest in music and medicine, he attended Brandeis, where he majored in music, took pre-med classes, and worked for an EMS service in Waltham, MA. In 1992 he returned to New York, and obtained an MPH at Columbia, and discovered he loved thinking about populations, and wanted to learn more about the organizations helping to study them.

After graduation in 1998, he considered consulting, but instead joined a contract research organization, Parexel and worked closely with Dr. Mark Goldberg, who would go on to become the President and COO. He eventually left Parexel to join a VC-backed company in Waltham that was ultimately acquired by Bristol Myers Squibb.

At around this time, Craig’s life changed dramatically and unexpectedly when he was diagnosed with pulmonary sarcoidosis. He decided to make a life change, so he returned to the New York area and joined Pfizer in 2006, where he would stay for eleven years. Craig built their clinical innovation program from a footnote to a core business capability. Within a year of joining Pfizer, Craig began to apply his personal experience as an e-patient and was designing the industry’s first fully at-home decentralized clinical trial – the Pfizer REMOTE study. During his tenure, Pfizer — along with the rest of the industry –would increasingly begin to appreciate the value of digital and the opportunity for patient-centricity that Craig had been championing so passionately for years.

Today, Craig serves as an independent adviser, sharing his experience, expertise, and learnings with biopharma companies, startups, and investors.

Tech Tonics: Tele-behavioral Health – Breaking Down Barriers and Stigmas at a Time of Escalating Need May 04, 2020

For 20 years, advocates of telemedicine have been trying to break through to common usage. For all of modern human history, those with mental health challenges have held back from seeking treatment due to the stigma associated with doing so. And then, a Chinese bat opened the flood gates. Today we are seeing record usage of telemedicine, especially for mental health needs of all types.

Regular Tech Tonics listeners know our usual approach is in-depth personal interviews with individuals. Today, in light of current events, we decided to take a topical detour into how the coronavirus pandemic has driven vast advances in the use of telemedicine and has brought out into the open the importance of access to mental health treatment. The combination of these things into what we know now as tele-behavioral health, is our topic today. We invited three tele-behavioral health experts serving different populations to join the show and share with us what they are seeing in the new world order; those people are:

Russell Glass, CEO of Ginger
Margaret Laws, co-founder of Nod (and CEO of HopeLab)
Steve Smith, CEO of NOCD

Notably, all three of these organizations are experiencing skyrocketing use of their tele-behavioral health products and have seen some surprising customers enter their system. Interestingly, the pandemic has driven a stunning rise in telemedicine, but also a much greater openness to discussing and acting on the need for mental health care. Un-hampered by lack of reimbursement or physician/provider reluctance, these companies’ digital approaches are gaining in popularity in a way that may be persistent post-crisis. And not only are patients enjoying their experiences; they consistently report that access challenges have been markedly reduced as compared to the pre-pandemic era. Imagine that.

Never has the need for mental health care been more acute. The Kaiser Family Foundation notes that “More than four in ten adults overall (45%) feel that worry and stress related to coronavirus has had a negative impact on their mental health, up from 32% in early March.” If one needed more proof of the mental health crisis we are facing, prescriptions per week for antidepressants, anti-anxiety and anti-insomnia drugs increased by 21% between February 16 and March 15, peaking the week of March 15 when the virus was deemed a pandemic. The largest increase was in anti-anxiety medications, according to the report, which rose by 34.1% over that month, in contrast to double digit drops in the use of some of these medications over the previous five years, according to this Fierce Healthcare article.

We are grateful to our guests for their willingness to do the show and even more so for their commitment tackling the issues that are plaguing so many people today. Whether you are an adult, a child, a teen; whether you are someone with serious mental health issues or more common ones; whether you are alone, with your family, or in any other situation, know that there is help out there for you – you can access mental health services 24-hours a day by telemedicine by accessing these three companies and many others.

We are grateful to Manatt Health for sponsoring today’s episode of Tech Tonics—Manatt Health is a multi-disciplinary professional services firm that integrates a full-service law firm with a broad-based strategic business and policy consulting practice to help our clients grow and prosper. Manatt Health supports the full range of stakeholders in transforming America’s healthcare system.

Show Notes:

Kaiser Family Foundation report on coronavirus impact on mental health

Great Forbes article about Nod and how it can help during the pandemic

Press Release about Free Access to Mental Health Coaching during the Pandemic

https://abcnews.go.com/US/living-ocd-pandemic/story?id=70237405

List of available mental health resources during the pandemic crisis (not exhaustive and frequently updated)

Lisa’s article on the dramatic rise in digital health as a result of the pandemic.

David’s interview in Timmerman Report with his brother, Jonathan, a psychiatrist in L.A. who was an early adopter of telemedicine. Jonathan discusses his first-hand experiences adjusting to this technology.

Tech Tonics: Toby Cosgrove – Resilient, Dyslexic Physician-Innovator Apr 20, 2020

A brilliant and creative cardiac surgeon who went on to become the brilliant and creative CEO of the Cleveland Clinic for 14 years, Dr. Toby Cosgrove surprised many when he was invited back to his alma mater, Williams College, to give a convocation address. As his topic he picked: failure. In our latest episode of Tech Tonics, we learn more about Toby’s unusual journey, and why, in reflecting on his exceptional career, he chose to focus on such an improbable theme.

Toby grew up in Watertown, N.Y., in a family that emphasized both academics and sports (all of them, it seems); he attended college at Williams, and told us his experience was “terrible.” He struggled to keep up with the large amounts of reading required, and only later learned that he had dyslexia, a circumscribed defect in “phonological processing,” often seen in the context of exceptional intellect and other talents – the so-called “Sea of Strengths” model. Toby’s described this experience as “terribly dispiriting,” adding “I thought I was dumb.”

Toby persevered, attended medical school at University of Virginia (“the only acceptance out of 13 schools I applied to”), discovered he enjoyed it, and gravitated towards surgery in general, and cardiac surgery in particular. He completed two years of surgical training then served a year at a military hospital in Vietnam during the war, ultimately receiving a Bronze Star for his contributions. He then continued his training in cardiac surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he was helpfully told he was the least talented individual in his residency group and advised not to pursue cardiac surgery – a recommendation he fortunately ignored.

In short order, Toby emerged as an incredibly talented, soon legendary, cardiac surgeon, known for his creative solutions to patients with valvular disease. Toby says he embraced the mechanical ingenuity cardiac surgery required.

Toby’s rapid ascent through the ranks of medicine culminated with his appointment as CEO of the Cleveland Clinic, where he focused on two areas that were in a sense at the opposite ends of the spectrum: careful measurement and transparent metrics, on the one hand, and a deep commitment to essential intangibles, like empathy, on the other.

After fourteen years, Toby stepped down as CEO; today, among other responsibilities, he serves as an advisor to Google Cloud, and discusses with us his perspective on the role of digital and data in healthcare.

We’re grateful our sponsor, Manatt Health—a multi-disciplinary professional services firm that includes a full service law firm and a broad-based strategic business and policy consulting practice to help clients grow and prosper. Manatt Health supports the full range of stakeholders in transforming America’s healthcare system.

Show notes:
Yale panel (with Toby, Ari Emanuel, and others) discussed here.
Profile of Toby on Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity website
New, updated edition of Overcoming Dyslexia, the best-selling book written by David’s mom, Sally, and his brother, Jonathan can be found here.
Profile by Katie Hafner in The New York Times of David’s parents, Bennett and Sally, focused on their ongoing career research in dyslexia
Essay on “Failure” written by Toby.

Famous Cleveland Clinic “Empathy” video, an initiative launched by Toby.

Tech Tonics: Torrie Fields, The Business of Making Better Memories Apr 06, 2020

A childhood fraught with illness, loss and uncertainty drove Torrie Fields to an adulthood focused on making these experiences better for others. Torrie sincerely believes that we are all here for a reason and that her reason to is help people have more dignified, less painful experiences at the end of their lives.

Having learned early in life that you could take nothing for granted and that you really need to show up when things are going in the right direction. Torrie has parlayed these guiding principles into an accelerated and notable career, culminating in the founding of Votive Health, which she views as a company in the business of making better memories – by that she means, “There is an intimate tie between how you die and how people remember you.” Votive Health is also a company focused on using data and people to help manage the care of patients with serious illnesses. The company, which is now launching, also works firsthand at the intersection of illness, insurance and employment, which is clearly a critical confluence at this currently challenging time of COVID-19. Notably, David and I recorded this show well before we knew what was coming on the plague front. This show seems particularly relevant now.

Torrie’s early career you focused on emergency preparedness and epidemiology with a special focus on systems design. This skill set served her well through her time at McKinsey and then later, when she somewhat randomly applied for an actuarial program at Cambia Health Solutions, the parent of Regence Blue Cross Blue Shield and several other companies. The wonderfully kind and very community-minded CEO of Cambia, Mark Ganz, encouraged employees to seek a special project that was meaningful to them – ultimately this led Torrie to found and ultimately lead Cambia’s palliative care program. She later joined Blue Shield California to start a similar program. She later joined Blue Shield California to start a similar program.

Torrie discusses the challenges at the intersection of palliative care, end of life vs. the traditional medical and insurance systems, where there are no standard definitions of palliative care, few appropriate payment models, bad program packaging and low prioritization. Given the current COVID-19 environment, perhaps we will see some changes in that.

We loved having Torrie on the show, as despite what can be a dark topic, she is a perennial ray of sunshine.

We are grateful to Manatt Health for sponsoring today’s episode of Tech Tonics—Manatt Health is a multi-disciplinary professional services firm that integrates a full-service law firm with a broad-based strategic business and policy consulting practice to help our clients grow and prosper. Manatt Health supports the full range of stakeholders in transforming America’s healthcare system.

Show Notes:

A useful article about COVID-19-related advanced care planning from the Kaiser Family Foundation can be found HERE
A prior post by Lisa on end of life is HERE.

Tech Tonics: Laurie Zephyrin, MD: Public Health as Destiny Mar 23, 2020

Dr. Laurie Zephyrin was disappointed to learn that a less-than-rock-star voice was going to stand in the way of her career as a singer, but fortunately she locked onto her healthcare destiny in her teens. A formative moment in high school set Laurie Zephyrin in the direction of public health and she has never looked back. This path has taken her through the White House, the Veterans’ Administration, into tiny villages in Africa and back to New York City. Through it all, Laurie is always seeking to drive towards a high-performing healthcare system, and especially one that effectively meet the needs of underserved populations.

Laurie went to medical school and became an OB/Gyn, heavily influenced by Dr. Jack Geiger at CCNY, who was a leader in bringing the concept of community-based care and the importance of human rights and social determinants of health to the fore.

She spent time after as a White House fellow, assigned to the Veterans Administration to assist with the medical impact of Hurricane Katrina, among other things. After a stint in community practice, Laurie returned to the VA as the first National Director of the Reproductive Health Program, where she had to undertake a major system redesign to transition a program designed to serve male soldiers to one that served all genders well. In 2016-2017, she became Acting Assistant Deputy Under Secretary for Health for Community Care, and later Acting Deputy Under Secretary for Health for Community Care, managing a $13B budget in a system that was getting a lot of publicity, not always the good kind.

Along the way Laurie became a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar and then Aspen Institute Health Innovation Fellow (where she met Lisa). She also earned an M.B.A. and M.P.H. from Johns Hopkins University to augment her M.D. degree from the New York University School of Medicine.

Laurie recently left government to broaden her impact on public health through her leadership role at the Commonwealth Fund, one of the first private foundations started by a woman in 1918. It’s a perfect match in many ways, given The Commonwealth Fund’s mission to promote a high-performing health care system and Laurie’s commitment to improving health for all, but especially women.

Tech Tonics is sponsored by Manatt Health, a multi-disciplinary professional services firm that includes a full service law firm and a broad-based strategic business and policy consulting practice to help clients grow and prosper. Manatt Health supports the full range of stakeholders in transforming America’s healthcare system.

Tech Tonics: Dr. Lynda Chin – Bringing AI to Medicine Through Infrastructure Mar 09, 2020

Taking on challenges is nothing new for Dr. Lynda Chin. It started with learning English well enough in a couple of years to graduate valedictorian of her high school, evolved to a distinguished career as a physician-scientist and then full professor at Harvard & the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, and ultimately led to her current role as founder and CEO of Apricity, seeking to bring digital technology to improve the care of oncology patients.

Lynda Chin’s family emigrated to the United States from China when she was in high school. Through determination, and with the help of television (she cites “Starsky and Hutch” as her primary vocabulary inspiration), she taught herself English, graduated at the top of her class, and went to college at Brown University, where she created her own major – neuroscience – and conducted research involving echolocation in bats.

Over time, she became interested in molecular biology, attended medical school at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and continued her training in internal medicine and dermatology, while developing a research program on mouse models of cancer, which she was then recruited to Harvard to pursue.

An unanticipated setback at the lab – a mouse hepatitis virus infection in the mouse facility wiped out her engineered mouse colony, putting much of her research program on hold– led her to focus on the emerging technology of transcriptome profiling at scale. She adapted it to engineered mouse tumors for cross-species comparison, and more broadly, to an expertise in translational oncology, which she pursued at both the Broad Institute and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute as part of The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) project. She was particularly proud of the work in building the genomic data analytic pipeline (Firehose) to enable not only access to but use of TCGA data by the broader community. She rapidly rose through the ranks to the level of full professor, and was elected to the National Academy of Medicine for her research contribution.

Lynda ultimately decided she was ready for the next challenge: she joined MD Anderson Cancer Center with the idea of creating a forward-looking translation-centered department to develop technology and analytic infrastructure to enable Genomic Medicine. She was also interested in the promise of AI, and helped set up a collaboration with IBM Watson to explore its application in cancer. This project surfaced important hurdles for effective and responsible application of AI in the healthcare context.

Lynda is now applying these lessons as CEO of Apricity, a digital medicine company seeking to leverage data and AI to close the gap between promising clinical trial outcomes and the often more disappointing results in real-world care. She is also championing the importance of pragmatic implementation of AI and other technologies in medicine, a focus of an upcoming conference she is leading in Boston (David is also on the organizing committee).

Tech Tonics is sponsored by Manatt Health, a multi-disciplinary professional services firm that includes a full service law firm and a broad-based strategic business and policy consulting practice to help clients grow and prosper. Manatt Health supports the full range of stakeholders in transforming America’s healthcare system.

Show notes:

David’s recent Wall Street Journal review of Facebook: The Inside Story, by Steven Levy here.

“AI and Big Data In Cancer: From Innovation To Impact” Conference, March 29-31 in Boston, more here.

Tech Tonics: Seth Feuerstein – Behavioral Health Entrepreneur Before It Was Cool Feb 17, 2020

Seth Feuerstein’s grandfather was a physician and his parents were both attorneys, so naturally his parents thought he would become…a comedian! While that didn’t come to be, he did end up as both a doctor and a lawyer who practiced neither discipline full time. Instead, Seth combined his skill sets to serially create new behavioral health companies that make a real difference.

Always deeply influenced by following his grandfather, an old fashioned family doctor who went to patients’ homes on the lower east side of New York. Seth reports remembering how important understanding the family dynamic was and how understanding each person’s personal circumstances was essential to treating them effectively. He went to college at Cornell and followed that by enrolling in a joint medical school/law school program at NYU that was essentially a program of his own creation. In fact, being the pioneering co-creator of this joint degree program was not his first entrepreneurial experience – Seth had a custom t-shirt business and a baseball card business in his early years; the innovation gene ran deep.

As an aspiring MD psychiatrist and a JD, Seth spent his early career working at the nexus of these fields – in forensics working for the medical examiner. When he got his your first full time medical job, as an internal medicine doctor in New Haven, he quickly figured out that he was not meant to be a full time doctor. He also realized he had a penchant for business that he leveraged into a Yale fellowship in new venture creation, working with the technology transfer office. He then joined the venture world and had a lucky first win with Histometrics, his first board and formal business experience.

He was soon appointed CEO of Carigent a nano-particle delivery company, but that did not go as planned, in part due to the financial crisis and in part due to his own health crisis. As a doctor and a lawyer, Seth was misdiagnosed, mistreated, dealt with major healthcare system hassles, and did not have training he needed to engage with his kids about his diagnosis. He realized that there was great opportunity, as well, in engaging around the behavioral health needs of those undergoing care for serious and terminal conditions. But despite the death sentence that he had been given, Seth was eventually relieved to find that he would recover. He and his wife, Sharon, started a non-profit, Little Wonder, a non-profit organization dedicated to enriching the lives of patients suffering from cancer by providing them tickets to local concerts, family entertainment, live theater, and sporting events.

But soon Seth was back to scratching the for-profit entrepreneurial itch, starting Cobalt Therapeutics in 2009, a digital Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) company that was before its time. Cobalt was acquired by Magellan Health fours later, and Seth became the company’s chief innovation officer. He remained there until he decided it was time, again, to start something new.

Seth’s latest venture is Oui Therapeutics, a digital therapeutics company focused on treating suicidality. That company, Oui Therapeutics, is early stage but eager to address this horrific public health challenge. According to Seth, digital therapeutics will thrive as a sector because software can bring patients and clinicians together and refocus the relationship on the right things better handled between patient and computer. Essentially he sees software as a way to optimize the patient-clinician relationship, enabling the clinician to work at the top of their license and giving the patient the ability to engage in treatment on more flexible terms.

We are grateful to Manatt Health for sponsoring TechTonics—Manatt Health is a multi-disciplinary professional services firm that integrates a full service law firm with a broad-based strategic business and policy consulting practice to help our clients grow and prosper. Manatt Health supports the full range of stakeholders in transforming America’s healthcare system.

You can donate to Little Wonder.org

Tech Tonics: Sean Khozin, Attuned To Data Science Feb 03, 2020

After escaping the revolution in Iran, Sean Khozin found his way to the United States, harmonizing his passion for patients and data into a career that’s led him into startups, the FDA, and most recently J&J, where he’s now Global Head of Data Strategy – all while pursuing his love of music.

The phrase “it’s complicated” tends to be overused, but it hardly seems to do justice to Sean’s journey. Sean was born in Tehran, a son sandwiched between two daughters. Life for Sean’s family changed after the Revolution; the arrest of his dad, a political scientist, suggested it might be a good time to emigrate, which the entire family eventually did. Sean, while in high school, initially went to live with relatives in Turkey, then came to the United States, where his family reunited in Maryland. Sean completed high school in the US, and attended the University of Maryland, studying neurobiology and music theory, and traveling extensively on the side to NYC to pursue his passion for music composition and performance (especially classical guitar).

After a pre-doctoral fellowship at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), and obtaining an MPH, Sean went to medical school, but was surprised by how unscientific so much of medicine was as compared to science. After receiving his MD, he took at detour into entrepreneurship for several years, before being seduced back into medicine, completing a fellowship in oncology at the NCI, drawn by the promise he could pursue sophisticated analytics, inspired by the intellectual activity that was occurring in DC at the time, in particular the work of Todd Park and Aneesh Chopra.

After his fellowship, Sean transitioned to the FDA, where he developed and championed the “INFORMED” initiative, which he’s described as “an incubator for driving innovations in agile technology, digital health, and data science to advance public health.” Late last year, Sean left DC for J&J, where he’s now head of data science strategy, and has the chance to work with some of the smartest and most decent people in the industry, including J&J’s head of R&D Mathai Mammen, (an MD/PhD classmate of David’s).

Tech Tonics is grateful to Manatt Health for its sponsorship of the show. Manatt Health is a multi-disciplinary professional services firm that includes a full service law firm and a broad-based strategic business and policy consulting practice to help clients grow and prosper. Manatt Health supports the full range of stakeholders in transforming America’s healthcare system.

Tech Tonics: Matthew De Silva, CEO & Founder of Notable Labs Jan 20, 2020

Matthew De Silva was a macro finance guy working for Peter Thiel’s hedge fund, Clarium Capital, when a family illness profoundly changed the course of his career, leading him to found Notable Labs, a Bay Area startup that aspires to identify better treatments for patients.

Matthew had a busy childhood. Born in Ontario, Canada, his family moved to the U.S. when he was three. The family lived in seven states over the course of Matthew’s childhood, as it followed the career progression of his father, a marketing director at an oil and gas pump company.

Besides playing a mean trombone, Matthew was interested in history and economics; he started college at Purdue but an evolving interest in finance and a quant orientation led him to transfer to Cornell (notably closer to Wall Street), and from there, to Peter Thiel’s hedge fund, Clarium Capital, known for its contrarian approach to investing.

Matthew notes that one of the most contrarian things he’s done is get married at the age of 21 to his high school sweetheart; he became a dad a few years later – but tragically, the same year, his dad received a devastating diagnosis of brain cancer. While Matthew focused all his efforts and analytic expertise on trying to find a promising approach for his father, his dad ultimately passed away from the terrible disease. The experience motivated Matthew to found a startup, Notable Labs, which aims to identify and accelerate promising therapeutic approaches for cancer by studying and analyzing the behavior of cancer cells from patients.

Notably, the company has recently been named to Fast Company’s Inaugural List of the 50 Best Workplaces for Innovators alongside such notable companies as Amazon, Chobani and P&G.

We’re grateful to Matthew for joining us on Tech Tonics, and sharing his experiences, including some really difficult ones, so candidly and so generously.

Tech Tonics is graciously sponsored by Manatt Health—a multi-disciplinary professional services firm that includes a full service law firm and a broad-based strategic business and policy consulting practice to help clients grow and prosper. Manatt Health supports the full range of stakeholders in transforming America’s healthcare system.

Tech Tonics: Nancy Schlichting, Always Unconventional Jan 06, 2020

Many people have heard of Nancy Schlichting, as she has been part of the fabric of the U.S. healthcare system for nearly 40 years. She has built a long and amazing career as someone who takes chances, makes unconventional choices and leads with her conscience. While her path to success wasn’t always easy, she learned pretty quickly that “courage is the very best lever for professional success.”

Nancy knew early on that she wanted to be involved in the medical world. She couldn’t stand the sight of blood, so went down the administrative, rather than medical path, studying hospital administration at Cornell. She rapidly moved up the hospital management career path, but was stopped short, albeit briefly, in 1993 when she was chief operating officer of Riverside Methodist Hospital in Columbus, and readying for her next move upwards. Instead, her CEO and the board of trustees received an anonymous letter saying in essence, “Congratulations on hiring a lesbian to run your hospital.” She didn’t get that promotion as planned, but she didn’t let it stand in the way of her success.

Ultimately Nancy took over the CEO role at Henry Ford Health System in 2003. While she got to be the captain, the ship itself it was a bit of a disaster, listing severely from its incurred debt and the lackluster clinical quality it was delivering. Undaunted, Nancy led the system through an incredible turn-around which rapidly resulted in profitability and soon after in the receipt of the Malcolm Baldridge award for quality. Nancy stayed at Henry Ford for 17 years, but despite the demands of that role, she found time to sit on over 80 public and private boards, and to play a major role in the revitalization of the downtown Detroit. She also served on President Obama’s Commision on Care, charged with understanding and improving the way that the Veteran’s Administration’s delivers care. She also, in 2015, authored a book called Unconventional Leadership, based on her experiences being a very outside the box leader at healthcare organizations of different stripes.

After many years of health system leadership, Nancy now continues to bring her style of leadership to the many organizations on which she serves on the Board, including Walgreens/Boots Alliance, Hill-Rom Corp., The Kresge Foundation, Duke University Health System, and Encompass Health. She is always thinking about how organizations can continue to get better and frequently serves as the ethical voice in the room, such as she did when she resigned her Board role at Michigan State as a result of the lack of transparency she perceived in the University’s handling of the Larry Nasser case.

In this episode of TechTonics, Nancy talks about her background, her coming out story, and also her views on the future of health systems and the role of technology in changing their forward trajectory. She also admits to being just a little over-competitive when it comes to golf.

We are grateful to Manatt Health for sponsoring TechTonics—Manatt Health is a multi-disciplinary professional services firm that integrates a full service law firm with a broad-based strategic business and policy consulting practice to help our clients grow and prosper. Manatt Health supports the full range of stakeholders in transforming America’s healthcare system.

Tech Tonics: Jim Manzi, Pragmatic Analytics For Business Dec 16, 2019

A physics and math wonk from MIT, Jim Manzi figured out early in his career that he loved the application of pragmatic, quantitative approaches to solve pesky real-world business problems, including today, challenges faced by life science and healthcare organizations.

Jim’s early life sounds like a Springsteen song, and indeed, he grew up less than 10 feet from E street in Belmar, NJ, where Spingsteen’s band originally practiced and from which it took it’s name. He was good in school but didn’t like it, teaching himself algebra over one summer so he could take a more advanced course in high school. Even so, he quit in 11^th grade, and applied to and got accepted at MIT, and started studying there when he was just 16. This is where Jim diverges from the Springsteen narrative.

Jim loved MIT and thrived there, then started a PhD program at Wharton but soon decided he preferred solving “messy, real-world problems” to pursuing the academic life. He eventually found his way to strategy consulting, which he pursued at a firm that pursued this domain in a particularly quantitative fashion. His passion later led him to start his own company, Applied Predictive Technology (APT)– that helped businesses make decisions by conducting well thought out, randomized controlled experiments in the real world business setting — how best to display food in a supermarket, for example.

Jim also explored the intellectual framework for this in a must-read book, Uncontrolled, that not only talks about the value of empirical studies but also discusses the danger of overgeneralizing in the policy setting on the basis of limited data. His rational view of topics from health policy to the environment are a welcome breath of fresh air, deeply rooted in science, yet appropriately cautious about extrapolating results beyond limits of the data, independent of what might be politically attractive or expedient.

Jim eventually sold APT, and more recently started a new company called foundry.ai, which seeks to apply AI to real-world business problems, including healthcare, as he discusses with us on today’s podcast (which David has also written about in his Astounding HealthTech column at The Timmerman Report, here).

Today’s episode is sponsored by Manatt Health—a multi-disciplinary professional services firm that includes a full service law firm and a broad-based strategic business and policy consulting practice to help our clients grow and prosper. Manatt Health supports the full range of stakeholders in transforming America’s healthcare system.

Tech Tonics: Jason Lehmbeck of SpecialX – Empathy as a Service Dec 02, 2019

Like many entrepreneurs, he was born with the itch. Jason Lehmbeck grew up around his father and grandfather, both entrepreneurs in their own areas of expertise– dad was a geologist who worked with the mining industry and grandpa had a butcher shop. He knew that his destiny was to be “one of those guys who ran a business and was his own boss.”

Jason has effectively fulfilled that promise more than once. Today, Jason is CEO of SpecialX, a company bringing life-changing information and services to kids with disabilities of all kinds and their families.

SpecialX is the perfect mix of pragmatism and compassion, reflecting Jason’s two primary personality characteristics. But while he is up to his elbows in the healthcare system now, he was one of those tech guys before and had a long career in internet advertising before he ever gave a second thought to the healthcare world. Jason started both successful and less successful endeavors, starting his first business while in college and capping his technology-focused career with the successful sale of his last one, DataPop, to a French company.

Now he is taking his serial entrepreneur chops and delivering on a personal promise he made to himself to leverage his business skills to do good, not just to do well. Like many who cross over from tech to healthcare, Jason’s own family experience gave him the impetus to take action. As the parent of a child with a disability (a complex genetic disease called Fox-G1) found out the hard way how difficult it is for families to navigate the world of resources to help his child. Given the complexity, misaligned incentives and broken markets he experienced first-hand, Jason realized there was a serious opportunity to make a difference.

As he tested his theory by speaking to hundreds of families struggling with similar situations, Jason knew a market opportunity when he saw one. Together with his business partner from DataPop, the pair is in the process of a beta launch of SpecialX, which has the mission to help parents navigate and better collaborate with in-school and beyond-school resources for their children with special needs while at the same time building a community among families to enable peer-to-peer support. The first market is the Los Angeles area where Jason resides, but his goal is to take the initiative nationwide and to build a large and profitable business, as he has done before. Think EaaS: Empathy as a Service.

While Jason has turned his experience into an emerging company that may just change the dynamics of what it means to be a family supporting a child with disabilities, he is also a fellow podcaster, co-hosting the show “Who Lives Like This” with Elizabeth Aquino, to tell the stories of caregivers of disabled children and their families.

What a pleasure to have Jason on our show today!

We are grateful to Manatt Health for sponsoring today’s show—Manatt Health is a multi-disciplinary professional services firm that integrates a full service law firm with a broad-based strategic business and policy consulting practice to help our clients grow and prosper. Manatt Health supports the full range of stakeholders in transforming America’s healthcare system.

And remember to leave a positive review on iTunes if you enjoy the show!

References:

Two books Jason recommends to have a better understanding about kids with disabilities and their families: Far from the Tree by Andrew Solomon and Not What I Expected by Dr. Rita Eichenstein

Who Lives Like This podcast

Tech Tonics: Shami Feinglass – Doctor, Policy-Maker, BMX rider Nov 20, 2019

Shamiram “Shami” Feinglass, MD, MPH, should have been a born again flower child. She spent her childhood among the San Francisco royalty that defined the 60’s and 70’s rock and roll culture here in the City by the Bay. Her single mom raised her while helping found the legendary Haight Ashbury Free Clinic, which was Shami’s first exposure to medicine. One of her mom’s best friend was the legendary concert promoter Bill Graham and she grew up thinking nothing of hanging out at Santana’s birthday party or having Passover at Delancey Street or celebrating at Glide Memorial Church.

But Shami didn’t end up as a perennial Berkeley protestor in Birkenstocks – she had higher aspirations to be a ballerina or a doctor. In a way she got both – she is doctor by day and dances for fun. She is also currently Global Head of Medical and Government Affairs at Danaher Corp., one one of the nation’s biggest companies you never heard of. Danaher is ranked 160^th on the Fortune 500 and has over $19 billion in revenue. Shami is a key leader in the company’s extensive diagnostics and life sciences businesses. Oh, and by the way, she also happens to be a nationally and internationally ranked BMX bike racer, holding a Maryland BMX State Championship spot and an active member of the USA BMX World Championship Team.

At this point you should realize: Shami does nothing halfway.

Shami’s path from backstage groupie to front stage leader took a path through medicine and particularly through the world of government and public policy. She helped Rosalyn Carter think through mental health policy during her own studies at Emory and was a Commander in the US Public Health Service. She was later a Senior Medical Officer at CMS, working with fellow Tech Tonics podcast guest Tanisha Carino, where she helped drive adoption and implementation of the newly rising concept of evidence-based policy. All this while raising a family of two kids, completing two medical residencies, being named a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar, and serving as a mentor to women in the medical and life sciences fields.

For the record, Shami, like Lisa, is an Aspen Institute Health Innovation Fellow and both attended the same 1983 Day on the Green concert, though they did not yet know they were bound to be friends.

Shami’s godfather, legendary Bay Area chef Narsai David, was the one who gave her the name Shamiram, not one that is easily found on bike license plates. Legend has it that Shamiram was an Assyrian Queen who actually invented the library, even though a man, Hannibal, later got credit for it. Shami has taken that inequity to heart and wholeheartedly committed to ensuring gender equality and equity in the workplace. She prides herself on being someone who loves to dive into things that scare her, though it’s hard to imagine what might make that list.

Tech Tonics: Sam Brasch, A Modern Day Alex P. Keaton at Work Nov 04, 2019

Born and bred in Mill Valley, California, where we record our podcast, Sam Brasch saw himself as a modern-day Alex P. Keaton – he just wanted to be a business man. He was “that kid” who was reading the Lee Iacocca biography in 4th grade while the other kids played soccer and kickball. Sam got his wish and is today Senior Managing Director of Kaiser Ventures, the corporate venture fund that helps drive innovation for Kaiser Permanente.

In today’s show, Alex, er Sam talks about how the Bay Area changed over his life time and what motivated him to shun his alternative plan to be a Supreme Court Justice or a Senator.

In fact, Sam almost diverted to medical school after his own medical crisis: a serious head injury. Instead of taking that path, he joined a consulting firm and focused on healthcare. As he thought about dream jobs, he considered how to meld his business ambitions with the field of health, first considering leadership at a healthcare system. Sam heard the siren song of eHealth and joined a startup called Medicopia (later named Vitals), his first exposure to entrepreneurship and to the pleasing notion that there didn’t have to be rules about how to solve a problem.

Sam took a tour through Medtronic, then the Wharton Business School seeking his destiny. That destiny arrived on his door in the form of Frazier Ventures, a health care venture firm that “seemed sexy.” Venture clearly still has it, at least in Sam’s eyes, as he has been a venture investor ever since 2005, working in both independent venture funds and corporate funds, including the Kaiser Ventures fund that he now leads.

We are delighted to welcome Sam to Tech Tonics.

We are grateful to Manatt Health for sponsoring today’s show—Manatt Health is a multi-disciplinary professional services firm that integrates a full service law firm with a broad-based strategic business and policy consulting practice to help our clients grow and prosper. Manatt Health supports the full range of stakeholders in transforming America’s healthcare system.

Tech Tonics: Kari Nadeau, Where Curiosity Meets Compassion Oct 21, 2019

Stanford professor Kari Nadeau lives the life, some would say the dream, of what Judah Folkman has called the inquisitive physician, integrating her deep knowledge of chemistry, her experience in biotech drug development, and her clinical acumen and deeply-felt compassion for patients to bring the best of medicine and science to children and adults with food allergies.

Kari was born in New Hampshire and raised in New Jersey, at least in part on a houseboat, as her dad worked for the EPA. An inspirational chemistry teacher in high school motivated her interest in this discipline. After majoring in biology at Haverford, she returned to chemistry for the research component of her MD/PhD training, conducting her graduate work in the laboratory of distinguished Harvard chemist Chris Walsh (whose daughter, Allison, a brilliant oncologist at Stanford, we recently featured on Tech Tonics, here). Kari describes Chris as a remarkable mentor, keenly interested in translating science into application, and in appropriately collaborating with industry to achieve this goal.

After initially intending to train in pediatric oncology, Kari found herself drawn to clinical and translational research at Biogen in Boston. A sick relative on her husband’s side prompted the family to move to the Bay Area to be closer to them and further prompted Kari to realize she missed clinical medicine. After retraining as an allergist and immunologist, she continued pursuing translational work at Stanford, where she’s now a global leader in the study of food allergies.

We had a fantastically inspiring conversation, and are so glad she was able to join us on the show!

Tech Tonics is sponsored by Manatt Health, a multi-disciplinary professional services firm that includes a full service law firm and a broad-based strategic business and policy consulting practice to help clients grow and prosper. Manatt Health supports the full range of stakeholders in transforming America’s healthcare system.

Show notes:

David’s Forbes piece on Range, the captivating book he was gushing about at the top of the show (here).

New York Times profile of Kari (“The Allergy Buster”) (here).

Website for the Sean N Parker Center for Allergy and Asthma Research at Stanford, which Kari directs.

Recent FDA recommendation to approve the first medicine to ameliorate a food allergy (peanut) – discussed in this NPR piece.

Tech Tonics: David Altshuler, Physician-Scientist In Pursuit Of The New Oct 07, 2019

David Altshuler was living the academic dream as professor and human geneticist at Harvard and MIT, where he was co-founder and Deputy Director of the Broad Institute. Yet in December 2014, he left this life to join Vertex, in continued pursuit of his translational vision.

Born in upstate New York, David moved to the Boston area when he was a toddler and hasn’t looked back (nor beyond the 617). The son of a professor and an educator, David was inherently scholarly, attending MIT where he first experienced research in the lab of gene therapy pioneer Richard Mulligan, on the legendary third floor of the Whitehead Institute.

David saw enough of research to convince himself he wanted to pursue clinical medicine, and then, while in medical school at Harvard, he saw enough to convince himself he wanted to pursue biomedical research as well, so he pursued a joint MD/PhD. His PhD research resulted in what he describes as an exciting scientific result that didn’t fit neatly in an established framework, so it received scant attention – an observation that led to a fascinating conversation about incremental vs disruptive research on the podcast, and inspired this blog post from Lisa.

Ultimately, David found his passion and his calling in human genetics, working initially for and then subsequently in partnership with legendary scientist Eric Lander, with whom David helped co-found the transformational Broad Institute, and served as Deputy Director. Interestingly this decision in the mid 1990’s to work on the human genetics of polygenic, common diseases (vs monogenic, rare diseases, say) was viewed by many well-intended mentors as committing “career suicide.” Good thing he persisted.

More recently, David made another brave decision, leaving a comfortable and distinguished academic career to become a senior pharma R&D executive, serving as Executive VP of R&D at Vertex. We are so thrilled not only that David joined us on today’s show, but that he was so generous about sharing the complexities and uncertainties of his journey, and the key choices along the way. We’re sure you will be captivated as well!

This podcast is sponsored by Manatt Health—a multi-disciplinary professional services firm that includes a full service law firm and a broad-based strategic business and policy consulting practice to help our clients grow and prosper. Manatt Health supports the full range of stakeholders in transforming America’s healthcare system.

Podcast Notes:

The captivating book about the scientific process David references is Discovering, by Robert Root-Bernstein, available from Amazon here.

Luke Timmerman “Long Run” interview with Janelle Anderson, discussed on podcast, here.

David’s Forbes piece on cell engineering, focusing on company Janelle helped found; here.

Tech Tonics: Tanisha Carino Sep 23, 2019

Tanisha Carino’s family fled from the Ferdinand Marcos regime in the Phillipines and settled in what she still believes to be the sweetest of homes: Alabama. As she travelled through young adulthood she had her first awareness that many Americans live on the fringe, desperately needing both healthcare and social services. Since then Tanisha has spent her career in healthcare seeking to strike the perfect balance between being an expert and being a leader. In so doing, she is always looking for new ways to balance the concepts of cost and caring for the most vulnerable to best define the true essence of rational decision-making in our healthcare system.

Tanisha’s career has been guided by her family’s commitment to sacrifice and helping others, always asking herself, “what can I do that might be different and helpful to others?” From her first interaction with the healthcare system, as an intern at AID Atlanta through her roles in healthcare consulting at Avalere, pharma operations at GlaxoSmithKline and now at FasterCures she is ever on the hunt for ways to bring pragmatism and emphathy to her work. A constant theme through Tanisha’s journey has been how to align payment with value, recognizing that what we decide to value through reimbursement policy directly drives the research and development pathways of the future.

In her current role, Tanisha focuses on creative partnership models between industry, government and academia with a goal to optimize the implementation of the 21st Century Cures Act and on models of venture philanthropy that will speed new cures to patients, – particularly new therapeutics for rare diseases that industry elects not to develop because they lack of a large target market.She’s also known to try a little karaoke now and then, favoring Madonna’s Dress Me Up when it’s her turn to sing. We asked Tanisha what the healthcare systems’ karoke song would be; her response: Winner Takes it All. At least for now.
We are delighted to welcome our friend Tanisha to Tech Tonics!

We are grateful to our sponsor, Manatt Health. Manatt Health is a multi-disciplinary professional services firm that integrates a full service law firm with a broad-based strategic business and policy consulting practice to help our clients grow and prosper. Manatt Health supports the full range of stakeholders in transforming America’s healthcare system.

Tech Tonics: Glenn Pierce, All In Sep 09, 2019

Physician, scientist, patient, advocate: Glenn Pierce inhabits all four roles, and seems the physical embodiment of the translational impulse, driven by his own experiences coping with severe hemophilia to advance the science – and the policy – he hopes will eventually cure this condition for patients across the globe.

While other kids enjoyed carefree childhoods, Glenn spent much of his early years in the hospital, recovering from bleeding episodes associated with the hemophilia A with which he was born. From this experience was born a passion to cure hemophilia, a commitment he memorialized in writing when he was ten, during one of the many hospital stays.

Glenn, a native of Cleveland, attended college at Case Western, and stayed at Case for his MD/PhD, then went to Washington University in St. Louis for additional training in laboratory medicine and hematology, though he explicitly steered clear of hemophilia professionally, thinking at the time this might be uncomfortably close to home; on the side, however, he volunteered for hemophilia organizations, and became increasingly involved with the community.

After a series of industry roles with increasing responsibility, Glenn decided he wanted to unite his personal and professional passions, and started to work at the interface, leveraging his deep personal commitment and an increasingly large team of experts; in a sense, he became a hemophilia entrepreneur, working with his selected colleagues to drive the science forward in a range of companies that would include Bayer and Biogen.

Today, Glenn drives innovation as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Third Rock Ventures, where he’s foundationally involved with companies such as the liver-focused Ambys Medicines (note: David’s firm, TVI, is an investor). He is also actively involved with the World Federation of Hemophilia, as he seeks to improve the lives of patients with hemophilia around the globe.

We are delighted to welcome Glenn to Tech Tonics!

Today’s episode is sponsored by Manatt Health—a multi-disciplinary professional services firm that integrates a full service law firm and a broad-based strategic business and policy consulting practice to help its clients grow and prosper. Manatt Health supports the full range of stakeholders in transforming America’s healthcare system.

Tech Tonics: Navigating the Healthcare Highway with Megan Callahan, Lyft’s Head of Healthcare Aug 19, 2019

When Megan Callahan was growing up, she was supposed to end up in healthcare – she didn’t even know there were alternatives. And she has spent her career and life in and around the field in more ways than she ever expected, as both an executive and a breast cancer patient. What she didn’t foresee was that she would be putting her healthcare skills and experiences to work at a ride-sharing company, driving their navigation of the healthcare highway.

Veering off her original plan to become a physician, Megan got an Masters in Public Health and headed into epidemiology, looking at underserved populations devastated by cancer in the strip-mining town of Pueblo, CO. But seeing that her ability to make a meaningful impact was limited, she headed down a different, more business-oriented path, first at firms like Anderson Consulting and HealthNet, but later finding her way into a pod of people that traveled from startup to startup together. Along the way she learned some great lessons about entrepreneurship but some tough ones about trust, governance, and the pitfalls of poor leadership.

Eventually Megan joined McKesson, working in the health solutions business in strategy and M&A. But in 2014 she learned she had Stage 3b breast cancer and got a front row seat in patient experience, dropping everything to recover and spend as much time as she could with her two young daughters. Fortunately, the story ended well, and McKesson was especially supportive, bringing Megan back after her recovery to design the strategy that led to the formation of Change Healthcare. In effect this was a return to the startup days, albeit one built by transferring assets from a large company and merging them with a small one. Megan stayed through formation of the company, wanting to “land the Change plane” because of a loyalty to her long-time team. She left in 2018 looking for a new adventure. Change Healthcare went public in 2019.

Lyft called Megan out of the blue while she was taking a sabbatical; the company could not have known that Megan’s own cancer experience painfully highlighted the importance of transportation support in healthcare. Megan jumped at the opportunity to combine her own experiences as a patient with her commitment to serving those in need. Moving from traditional healthcare players to Lyft has been characterized by an interesting revelation that being the healthcare voice in a non-healthcare company forces one to leave the jargon behind and frees one to think creatively in ways our traditional system sometime forgets to do.

Today’s episode is sponsored by Manatt Health—a multi-disciplinary professional services firm that integrates a full service law firm and a broad-based strategic business and policy consulting practice to help its clients grow and prosper. Manatt Health supports the full range of stakeholders in transforming America’s healthcare system.

Tech Tonics: Chris Gibson, Free Range Innovator Aug 05, 2019

With confidence he attributes to his free-range childhood, Chris Gibson has followed his instincts and his heart, stepping away from the MD/PhD program in which he’s enrolled to co-found and lead Recursion Pharmaceuticals, one of the buzziest companies bringing AI to drug development. In mid-July, Recursion closed a $121M Series C, bringing their valuation ever closer to unicorn status.

Chris grew up in Portland, the son of a tech entrepreneur and an artist, and as a child was permitted a degree of independence that seems vanishingly rare. He went to college at Rice, pursuing both bioengineering and business management. At Rice, he also met his future wife, who then attended medical school in San Antonio; Chris followed, initially pursuing a PhD in tissue engineering, then joining the MD/PhD program. His wife then elected to continue her training in neurogenetics in Salt Lake City; Chris soon joined her in Utah, talking his way into the MD/PhD program at the University of Utah, and joining the lab of noted physician-scientist Dean Li.

Ultimately, it was in thinking through a failed experiment that he and Li came up with the idea for Recursion Pharma, a company that starts with the premise that biology is “massively complex.” They realized that in order to have a chance to understand biology at the level needed for most novel therapeutic interventions, you need to operate at a very large scale and remove human bias to the extent possible, generating highly reproducible data through the aggressive use of automation and imaging, analyzed through the lens of machine learning.

Founded in 2013, Recursion has not only raised significant capital, but it has also attracted a cadre of talented drug developers and sophisticated technologists. The company, based in Salt Lake City, now has over 150 employees, and continues to grow rapidly. In today’s show, Chris describes his vision for the company, but also his anxieties as a founder boldly pushing forward into largely uncharted waters.

We are delighted to welcome Chris to Tech Tonics!

Today’s episode is sponsored by Manatt Health—a multi-disciplinary professional services firm that integrates a full service law firm and a broad-based strategic business and policy consulting practice to help its clients grow and prosper. Manatt Health supports the full range of stakeholders in transforming America’s healthcare system.

Tech Tonics: Sumit Nagpal, At the Crossroads of Tech and Healthcare Jul 22, 2019

Sumit Nagpal was born to a pair of healthcare entrepreneurs and raised in Kashmir, India. When he was 13, he came to the United States where he saw diversity for the first time. Sumit followed his parents into the Ivy League, starting at Brown, but left to follow his muse, Steve Jobs, at NeXT, where he worked side by side with Jobs for over two years. He continues to look at technology as a key driver of innovation, this time in healthcare, now from his recently accepted role as SVP and General Manager of Health Innovation for Comcast.

Sumit has been a serial entrepreneur between these two tech company gigs, starting The Method Factory, WellLogic, LumiraDx and two other enterprises, still in stealth. If Sumit has learned one thing during his entrepreneurial trek, it is this: Follow the Money. As he says, “Improvements won’t occur just because it’s the right thing to do.”

An impassioned golfer, Sumit says there are many lessons for entrepreneurs in the game, “One has to take lots of swings to get a tiny focused ball to a remote target. Focus, clarity of mind, practice and persistence are everything.”

We are grateful to Manatt Health for its sponsorship of Tech Tonics—Manatt Health is a multi-disciplinary professional services firm that integrates a full service law firm with a broad-based strategic business and policy consulting practice to help our clients grow and prosper. Manatt Health supports the full range of stakeholders in transforming America’s healthcare system.

Tech Tonics: Imran Haque, Grounded Data Scientist Jul 08, 2019

A computational biologist by training, Imran Haque has managed to achieve the near-impossible: embracing the promise of data science in medicine while retaining his critical faculties. He may well be just the sort of innovator required at the intersection of medicine and big data.

Born and raised in the Bay Area, Imran says he grew up in the sort of environment where his father, an electrical engineer, didn’t think twice, when Imran was in elementary school, about giving him a book about how to code – which he immediately devoured.

Imran went to college at Berkeley (go Bears!), where he majored in electrical engineering and computer science, and developed an interest in computational biology. He pursued this in graduate school in computer science at Stanford, where he was advised by such luminaries as computational biologist Vijay Pande (now a VC) and AI wizard Daphne Koller (a previous Tech Tonics guest, and the founder of insitro).

Imran subsequently has forged the path at the intersection of biology and analytics, assuming roles of increasing prominence at Counsyl (focused on carrier screening) and Freenome (early identification of cancer). In these roles he developed a reputation for rigorous and critical thinking, arguing that data suggest screening couples for many rare diseases represents a sensible idea, while screening healthy people for very early stage cancers by looking for circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) may run up against physical limitations, namely the lack of a single disease molecule in the typical volume of blood sampled.

In addition, as David has written in Forbes (see here, also here), Imran is excited about the opportunities associated with data and analytics in biology, but is wary about the seductive false positives powerful techniques tend to generate.

Join us today for a captivating conversation from the untamed frontier of analytics in medicine and drug discovery.

Today’s show is sponsored by IDEA pharma, the industry’s leading path-to-market strategy practice, bringing more great medicines to patients. You can find them at:
ideapharma.com.

Tech Tonics: Zoe Barry, Driving Entrepreneurship from the Fast Lane Jun 24, 2019

When Zoe Barry was a kid, she had two things she wanted to be when she grew up, either a veterinarian or “someone who writes checks.” She gave the first a shot and ended up settling on the second. Today she is CEO of ZappRx and a shining example of how drive and intellect can overcome adversity.

Zoe had a bit of a rough start in life, after a difficult divorce left she and her family surviving on food stamps and struggling to get by. But she had a mother who survived and ultimately thrived while holding the family together, and it was this role model who taught Zoe the importance of risk-taking, how to squeeze a dollar out of a nickel, and led to her mild obsession with check books.

Zoe’s original career hypothesis was that she should be a veterinarian. She even had a stint in Alaska helping to rehabilitate bald eagles and other birds of prey, but ultimately couldn’t see herself in a role that created such fear among the animals, as she observed in the field. She did stints on Wall Street both before and after Alaska, but found hedge fund executives even scarier than wild animals. Zoe’s stint as a babysitter for Jonathan Bush’s kids led her to a new field, human healthcare, where she learned the basics at Athena Health and rapidly identified a problem worth founding a company to solve: ensuring people with serious medical challenges got ready access to the specialty drugs they desperately need. Thus ZappRx was born.

Along the way Zoe has experienced the hard lessons that female executives often face on the fundraising trail and consistently observed that male CEOs got better deals than female ones. To cope, she developed a two-fold strategy to beat the usual suspects at their own game. The first step was becoming an active angel investor targeting opportunities in emerging women-led startups. The second was triggered by the emerging trend of VCs taking their portfolio CEOs race car driving. Zoe threw herself into mastering the sport, becoming an expert Mazda Global Cup race car driver who can drive run circles around the amateurs. With a clear double-meaning, Zoe says, “As a CEO, you have to throw yourself into the fast lane and never look back.” Zoe is now mentoring other women race car drivers and aspiring entrepreneurs through her ZappRx founders’ associate program.

We are revved up to feature Zoe on Tech Tonics.

And a special note: after we taped this episode, Zoe completed the sale of ZappRx to Allscripts.

We are grateful to GE Ventures for their sponsorship today. GE Ventures – Multiple Paths to Big Impact.

Tech Tonics: Karen Hong, Turning Grad School Pain To VC Gain Jun 10, 2019

In graduate school, Karen Hong’s dream of becoming a biologist crashed into the inconvenient reality that she couldn’t stand working in the lab. Undaunted, Karen, pivoted into venture capital, and hasn’t looked back.

As befits a future geneticist, Karen chose her own genes extremely wisely: her dad was a legendary wunderkind in Taiwan who had come to the US to pursue grad school at CalTech; her mom, also exceptionally bright, had come to the US to pursue a PhD in Chinese literature at the University of Washington. After a bit of moving around, they settled in the Bay Area where Karen’s father became a silicon valley tech entrepreneur (who also ran a chicken restaurant in Gilroy on the side). Karen proudly notes that her dad never took a dollar of venture money for his entrepreneurial endeavors – which is amusing since Karen and her younger sister Nancy both eventually became VCs.

After contemplating journalism (like Lisa) at Berkeley (Go Bears!) but majoring in chemistry (unlike Lisa), Karen went on to graduate school in biology at MIT (where she overlapped with David) where she loved the coursework and was inspired by the faculty. But she soon discovered that while she was really admired the scientist… who ran the lab she selected at the Whitehead Institute (a relatively unknown early-career geneticist at the time named Eric Lander, who would go on to found the Broad Institute), she realized she couldn’t stand the actual experience of working in the lab – a “soul-crushing” experience with which David (and, one imagines, others) could viscerally relate.

With her characteristic candor and humor, Karen discusses both the lows of graduate school as well as her journey into venture capital, including the pivotal role of an exceptional mentor, Jean George, and some of the challenges she encountered and overcame along the way to her present role: a Boston-based partner at Novo Ventures.

We are delighted to welcome Karen to Tech Tonics. Today’s show — the 100th episode of Tech Tonics! — is sponsored by Medidata: Medidata – the Intelligent Platform for Life Sciences that closes the loop between clinical development and commercialization to power smarter treatments and healthier people.

Tech Tonics: Rebecca Kaul – Bending Tech to People, Not People to Tech May 20, 2019

Rebecca Kaul had planned to be a doctor. But life and the HMO era got in the way. As a result she went down an entirely different and windy path through chemical engineering, public policy, consulting on information systems and reinsurance. And together these all led her right back to a different way of contributing to the advancement of medicine. Today Rebecca is Chief Innovation Officer at MD Anderson Cancer Center where she is side by side with physicians delivering on the mission to end cancer as we know it.

Rebecca has a remarkable record as an intrapreneur, helping launch dozens of companies and new innovations first from inside UPMC and subsequently from her current role inside MD Anderson. If nothing else, she has learned that successful innovation is far more about culture change and shared values than about technology. As Rebecca says, one must focus on “purpose finding tech, not tech finding a purpose.” She speaks about the difference between innovation professionals and innovators, the former being at their best when they focus on helping operations realize a vision for change by serving as the facilitators, not as the problem solvers. Innovation professionals who “think they can ride in on a white horse and fix things,” she says, are not doing it right.

We are grateful to GE Ventures for their sponsorship today. GE Ventures – Multiple Paths to Big Impact.

Tech Tonics: Calum MacRae, Reimagining Medicine From Within May 06, 2019

A brilliant cardiologist and geneticist, Dr. Calum McRae rose to the top of academic medicine – then decided to reinvent it, from the inside. He just may be the person to do it.

Born on the Isle of Skye off the coast of Scotland, Calum was the son of a physician, and couldn’t resist the call of medicine himself, attending medical school in Edinburgh, and then pursuing cardiology, as well as a genetics PhD, in London. He continued his scientific training in Boston, with pioneer cardiac geneticists Cricket and Jonathan Seidman; he also repeated his medicine and cardiology training to get certified in the U.S.

Calum thrived in the Harvard ecosystem, and quickly rose to prominence, first at the Massachusetts General Hospital, where he did a second postdoc with zebrafish pioneer Mark Fishman, ran the cardiovascular fellowship program; he then became chief of cardiology at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Today, he is Vice-Chair for Scientific Innovation at the Brigham and also the recipient of the $75M “One Brave Idea” Award, a five year research grant jointly sponsored by the American Heart Association, Verily, and AstraZeneca.

Calum’s hope is to accelerate medicine by becoming more systematic in the way information is collected and used; he envisions the “learning healthcare system” we’ve all heard so much about, but in his version it is more explicitly linked to getting at the underlying biology, as he discusses on today’s show. It was an honor to interview Calum.

This episode show is sponsored by Medidata the intelligent platform for life sciences that closes the loop between clinical development and commercialization to power smarter treatments and healthier people.

Tech Tonics: From Farm to Negotiating Table – James Dromey of the Murdoch Royal Children’s Institute Apr 22, 2019

Dr. James Dromey was supposed to be a farmer in County Cork, Ireland and has the milking experience to prove it. But apparently cows were not his destiny, even though he was a farm family’s only son. Instead, James left the farm for the teeming metropolis of Galway and never looked back. Today he is a London-educated Irishman who is married to a Belgian and lives Melbourne, where he is a local and national leader in pediatric medical research and digital health innovation.

Though he didn’t have a highly focused plan and claims to be a “take it as it comes” kind of person, James was drawn to science because he happened to have a great teacher who brought the field to life. He found his way to immunology and specifically to a post-doctoral focus on T-Cells in Type 1 diabetics, during which he learned first hand about the challenges of translating the world of the lab to clinical practice. James’ journey took him from Ireland to London and then on to Australia.

Because James also had a strong interest in business, he ultimately found his way to the world of biotech, getting a taste of the challenging world of building a commercial stage company in Australia, where the market is often too small and the funding too challenging to keep companies in country. But a lucky break led to a new role in tech transfer at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute for Medical Research and that led James to what he may well have been born to do, considering that professional basketball wasn’t in the cards (James is a sport fanatic and notably an avid Golden State Warriors fan – clearly proving he has good taste). James found his niche playing a role in others’ discoveries and helping them find a commercial home, which provided a combination of exposure to science and business in a way that scratched both of those itches in a highly satisfying way.

By 2012 James had been recruited to lead tech transfter at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute (MCRI) in Melbourne, the largest child health research institute in Australia and one of the top three worldwide. This ultimately led to his being named COO of MCRI, where he is now heading a team of 135 people dedicated to bringing the best of research, digital health innovation and next generation services to pediatric patients at the Melbourne Royal Children’s Hospital and around the world.

In this terrific Tech Tonics exchange, James talks about his path from the cow fields to MCRI, the challenges of innovating within a hospital, different ways of defining impact, and the key differences between being an innovator in Australia vs. the U.S. We were thrilled to have our mate, James, on the show.

We are grateful to GE Ventures for their sponsorship today. GE Ventures – Multiple Paths to Big Impact.

Tech Tonics: Andy Coravos, Championing Responsible Digital Medicine Apr 08, 2019

Andy Coravos left a promising career at a top private equity firm to follow her passion and pursue intensive training as a software developer; she now works on the frontier of engineering and medicine as CEO and co-founder of Elektra Labs, focused on the use of digital measures to support clinical research, and the generation of the sort of quality evidence she believes distinguishes “digital health” from “digital medicine.”

The daughter of a dentist and a nurse, Andy grew up with an exposure to healthcare, and an interest in making things, but found herself pursuing economics at college. After several years at McKinsey, and a stint at the private equity firm KKR, where she was on a promising career trajectory, Andy decided she owed it to herself to pursue what she viewed as her true passion, and she enrolled in an intense coding bootcamp.

This was a profound inflection point in her life, as she has remained closely engaged with tech ever since, including while at Harvard Business School, through stints as a software engineer at Instacart and Akili Interactive, and now at Elektra Labs. Andy has become an articulate thought leader, helping integrate business, technology, and healthcare in a deeply knowledgeable and considered fashion. We are delighted to have Andy on our show today!

Today’s episode is sponsored by IDEA Pharma, the industry’s leading path-to-market strategy practice, bring more great medicines to patients. You can find them at:
www.ideapharma.com

Tech Tonics: Carolyn Magill – May the Fast, Steep Road Rise Up to Meet You! Mar 18, 2019

Carolyn Magill had planned a life in foreign service or international relations. But it wasn’t until she found herself at the nexus of healthcare and public policy that she realized she found her home. She has now traveled through the worlds of pharma, payers, providers and had leadership positions at companies both large and small. An avid skier, Carolyn learned early that she likes to “go fast and steep;” this mantra has driven her back to the startup world over and over, where she can scratch that particular itch. After successful stints at United Healthcare, Evolent and other firms, Carolyn has now found herself the CEO of Aetion, a company helping change conventional healthcare wisdom through data science.

Carolyn’s deep Irish roots played a formative role in her development. She wrote her thesis about the IRA and “crisis bargaining,” which gave her a leg up in understanding the complexities of healthcare system negotiation and how to engage all of the many stakeholders with whom she comes into contact. She even regales us with an Irish rebel song on the podcast.

We are thrilled to welcome Carolyn to Tech Tonics.

We are grateful to GE Ventures for their sponsorship today. GE Ventures – Multiple Paths to Big Impact.

Show note: David has written about Aetion for Forbes:
Should Tech Entrepreneurs Aspire To Fix Clinical Trials Or Reinvent Them?

Tech Tonics: Toyin Ajayi – No Power Suit, But a Powerful Goal to Change Healthcare Delivery Mar 04, 2019

When she was a kid, Toyin Ajayi’s career goal was to “be the boss of something.” Drawn to power suits and authority, she aspired to become an unspecified boss lady. She may be a boss now, but her authority is well-balanced by a soft side. And Toyin’s path to her current role as Chief Health Officer of CityBlock Health took a route through public health and medicine where the power suit is rarely seen.

Toyin grew up in Kenya and was “raised like a boy” to be independent, outspoken and adventurous, a clear difference from the usual female upbringing in her home culture. She moved to the U.S. to go to Stanford and figure out how to end up in that power suit (or authority hoodie). But instead of taking the startup route that most of her friends pursued after graduating, Toyin rejected the competitive culture of Silicon Valley to launch into public health, first in San Francisco and later, after she got her medical degree, in Sierra Leone.

And yet…Toyin was always drawn to the operational and business side of medicine, and thus she ended up at a startup after all. Joining with her business partner Iyah Romm, they founded CityBlock Health, a for-profit company seeking a scalable way to help marginalized and underserved people get the very best medicine has to offer. She sees her role as a key translator between a bunch of soft and fuzzy clinicians and social workers and a hard core team of technical engineers, all of whom are driven by the the broader healthcare community’s more recent recognition of the importance of social determinants of health. If she gets her way, all of medicine will take a much broader view of patient care and change the prevention paradigm.

Lisa vividly remembers the first time she meet Toyin: as an audience member at the NCQA Quality Talks event where Toyin had the significant crowd enthralled. Her intellect, empathy and authenticity were obvious and remarkable. It quickly became clear that these are the words that everyone who knows Toyin would choose; she is universally loved for her skills as a physician and her humanity in helping those most in need…and for her silly side, which is also in evidence on the show.

We are grateful to GE Ventures for their sponsorship today. GE Ventures – Multiple Paths to Big Impact.

**Tech Tonics: Allison Kurian, Bringing Curiosity and Compassion To Breast Cancer Genetics** Feb 18, 2019
Allison Kurian never had a chance. The daughter of two prominent academics, Diana Chapman Walsh the former President of Wellesley College and Chris Walsh, a renowned Harvard biochemist – Allison was destined by genetics and environment, it seems, to become the exceptional scholar and clinician-scientist who she is now.

A self-described studious kid, Allison grew up in a house where scholarship was prized, and interesting intellectual celebrities were frequent guests. Despite her affection for Boston, Allison attended college at Stanford, which she adored, then returned to Boston for medical school (where she overlapped with David, who remembers her on clinical rotations playing Gallant to his Goofus), trained in internal medicine at MGH, and then returned once again to Palo Alto for her oncology fellowship training at Stanford, then was invited to join the faculty.

On today’s show, Allison discusses the current state of breast cancer genetics, her research focus, and addresses a range of really interesting and difficult questions, such as who should be screened for susceptibility genes. She touches on examples of people who should be screened but often aren’t (patients with ovarian cancer), and examples of how well-intentioned screening can be helpful if correctly interpreted but harmful if misinterpreted, such as if a “variant of uncertain significance” is viewed as pathologic, potentially leading to unwarranted major surgery.

Allison has a remarkable gift for making the complex understandable, and for offering evidence-backed insight with compassion and humanity. We are thrilled to have her on the program today!

Today’s episode is sponsored by Rockpointe: innovators in medical education and patient engagement. To learn more go to: RockpointE.com

Show notes:

David’s 2014 *Forbes* on breast cancer screening here; contrasting take by Dr. Steven Salzberg in *Forbes* here.

Photo credit: Steve Fisch

Tech Tonics: Jerry Harrison & Brian Smith – Making Beautiful Music Together with Healthcare Entrepreneurs Feb 04, 2019

An unlikely pair, Brian Smith and Jerry Harrison came together over their shared passion for music and science and helping entrepreneurs succeed. Together they are helping healthcare startups find their rhythm and chart a path to success through a new expert crowdfunding platform called RedCrow.

Here’s the backstory and it’s a good one:

Brian Smith, a Boston native, had specific plans to be the next Tom Brady when his uncle, a player for the Oakland Raiders, dissuaded him from that life. Instead, he took a path towards money management, eventually joining Morgan Stanley where it happened that many of his clients were physicians seeking wealth management strategies. But a tragic personal incident and a chance meeting with a medical device company sent Brian straight toward medicine and entrepreneurship and he hasn’t looked back.

Meanwhile, while growing up in Wisconsin, Jerry Harrison was going to be an architect or a scientist or work with computers. But life is funny and Jerry took a left turn along the way to become a key member of the bands the Modern Lovers and the Talking Heads. No really – he was the Talking Heads’ keyboardist and guitarist and wrote many of the best songs that were the soundtrack of our college experience (and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame). But Jerry’s love for science and technology was always present and led him to find ways to marry those with entrepreneurship as the band came to its natural end.

Brian and Jerry met through a mutual friend, Chad Taylor of the band LIVE, who knew of their broader shared interests and the rest is history. Today they are the founding team of RedCrow, a crowdfunding platform that connects financial and human capital to healthcare start-ups.

On the show, Brian and Jerry talk about the evolution of their present company, how they ended up finding their way to healthcare entrepreneurship, and how they see the future of healthcare startup funding. They also talk about music and how it intersects with all of these topics, including how producing a company is like producing an album and the songs that they believe most personify startup life.

We are delighted to welcome Brian and Jerry to Tech Tonics today!

We are grateful to GE Ventures for their sponsorship today. GE Ventures – Multiple Paths to Big Impact.

Tech Tonics: Susan Desmond-Hellmann, The Inquisitive Leader Jan 22, 2019

Her illustrious career has taken her from clinician to biotech executive to university chancellor to CEO of the world’s largest foundation, yet throughout this exceptional journey, Susan Desmond-Hellmann has remained empathetic, inquisitive, and emphatically true to herself.

Growing up in Reno, Nevada as one of seven children, Sue was inspired by her father, a pharmacist, and her mother, a teacher; she said she always wanted to be a doctor, but even so, she could not have predicted the direction and velocity of her subsequent career.

In today’s far-ranging discussion, Sue talks about how she discovered her passion for oncology; her introduction to and involvement in the HIV-AIDS crisis; how she and her husband Nick have supported each other across the ups and downs of their often-overlapping careers; their transition to pharma; her return to academia at UCSF after an exceptional decade and a half in industry; and. now as CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, her perspective on the future of public health — a view that leverages quantitative data and focuses on precision and personalization.

This is a captivating conversation that touches on translational research, executive leadership, and public health, as well as the person behind the success story. David and I spoke to Sue from her home in Washington State and were thrilled to have her on the show.

Today’s episode is sponsored by IDEA pharma, the industry’s leading path-to-market strategy practice, bring more medicines to patients. You can find them at:
ideapharma.com.

Show Notes:

This is the commentary about orphan drugs cited by David.

This Forbes column from David asks how to leverage data and analytics (as Sue proposes) without fetishizing them.

Tech Tonics: Axel Heitmueller, Everything is a Shade of Gray Jan 07, 2019

Axel Heitmueller, Ph.D. grew up in Germany, the son of an engineer. Yet, despite the often discrete intellectual structure engineering can impose, Axel’s personal experiences have taught him how important it is to find comfort with a state of gray. As a transition economist, he has learned that everyone has an opinion; as a caretaker to severely disabled children he learned about the relative value of life; and, as a government official, he has learned that one must balance incrementalism with radical change to make progress in effectively serving patients.

Despite an early belief that he wasn’t cut out for healthcare, Axel has had a notable career driving innovation in the UK healthcare system even though there is occasional resistance to receiving it. Axel has worked on both sides of the National Health System, serving three Prime Ministers and also working at community hospitals and related organizations. His current role is as Managing Director of Imperial College Health Partners. Among the big lessons he has learned is that there is no such thing as evidence-based policy-making and that incremental innovation is often better than no innovation at all.

Having lived close to the center of power, Axel’s current obsession is how we talk to our kids at this challenging moment in history. He is thinking hard about how we succeed in using broad-based civil discourse to empower citizens around culture, democracy, health and education to reduce the growing sense that there is an elite vs. disenfranchised population. It’s hard not to appreciate the way he is deeply thinking about how we curate conversations that include everyone around topics that affect each of us, often in different ways.

David and I spoke to Axel from his home in London and were thrilled to have him on the show. To hear today’s episode, click on the link or go to iTunes or Connected Social Media’s website.

We are grateful to GE Ventures for their sponsorship today. GE Ventures – Multiple Paths to Big Impact.

Tech Tonics: Ari Caroline: Broad Intellect Meets Deep Humanity Dec 03, 2018

An accomplished linguist who planned to take a job after college with a Russian oligarch (but rethought the notion after the man was nearly assassinated), Ari Caroline’s journey has taken him from language to economics to business to his current role as Chief Analytics Officer at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC), where he sees himself as a data intrapreneur, striving to use data to improve the care of patients with cancer.

The son of two scholars, Ari tells us he spent most of his childhood in Philadelphia. “I had a good sense of what I enjoyed,” Ari says that sports statistics, and science were his favorites, “but was less certain how to translate these interests into a career.” In college, he initially pursued languages – difficult languages including Russian and Mandarin – as he recognized he had a natural facility for learning them. He flirted with the idea of international business, and pursued quantitative finance at Yale before ultimately landing at MSKCC, helping to create and implement their data vision.

At MSKCC, Ari’s broad intellect and deep humanity have found expression in a range of initiatives aimed at applying data intelligently in the service of cancer patients and the care teams treating them. As Ari describes on the show, he looks closely at the costs and effects of different treatment regimens, and uses a range of techniques, including game theory, to try to understand how real world decisions occur. He also tells us why he agrees with Sean Parker’s comment that “tech people coming from tech to biology so dramatically underestimate the complexity of the human body.” In Ari’s view, building a data team in an academic center helps provide this much-needed domain expertise.

Ari also shares a deeply personal perspective of how religion – he describes himself as “conspicuously observant” – has impacted his life, from the superficial (patients mistaking him for a rabbi) to the more profound, including his affinity for mission-driven work, and his appreciation of the need to balance structure and chaos.

We are so delighted to welcome Ari to Tech Tonics!

This episode of Tech Tonics is sponsored by DNAnexus, the secure and compliant cloud platform that enables enterprise users to analyze, collaborate around, and integrate massive amounts of genetic and other health data.

Additional show notes:

New Yorker post-election cover

Henny Youngman’s doctor joke Lisa alludes to: “This guy asked his doctor, ‘Will I be able to play the piano after my operation?’ And the doctor says ‘Sure.’ And the guy says, ‘Funny, I couldn’t do it before.’”

Grammy Hall’s mental image of “conspicuously observant,” from Annie Hall, alluded to by David: here.

Tech Tonics: Sarah Iselin of Florida Blue – Bringing Light to the Darkness Nov 19, 2018

Growing up on Capitol Hill in a Washington, DC political family, Sarah Iselin did the obvious thing, at least to her, by rebelling and going to art school. But when her practical self realized that was going to make for a hard living, she eventually found her way to healthcare through an internship at the Visiting Nurses Association that launched her into a long and successful career. A serendipitous connection to a lifelong mentor, Andrew Dreyfus, now CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, led Sarah down a long and successful path at BCBS Massachusetts and its Foundation. This path then winded it’s way to the Massachusetts State House where she was instrumental in designing what we now call RomneyCare and served as Commissioner of Healthcare Finance and Policy in the administration of Governor Deval Patrick.

To know Sarah is to know she is pure sunshine. She is always smiling and ready to embrace you with a positive attitude. Yes, she has rapidly climbed the healthcare ladder, driving innovation as both payer executive and government official. But she is especially excited today to use her current leadership position as SVP and Chief Strategy Officer at Florida Blue Cross Blue Shield (aka Guidewell) as a platform to drive social justice by addressing community challenges like access to effective mental health care.

Sarah is exquisitely aware of the challenges people face when depression, anxiety and worse come calling. Because despite all of her success, Sarah has had, like so many others, also experienced the lowest of the lows. The love of her life committed suicide 3 ½ years ago and then, while she was reeling from that, her son experienced some severe mental health issues and spent a long time in psychiatric facilities and programs on his way to getting better.

Navigating the care process for her son laid bare the difficulties people face in accessing effective mental healthcare when they need it. Her openness on this topic and her willingness to talk openly about these experiences also serve to remind all of us that everyone has a story, and that even the most successful and accomplished people face the very real ups and downs of life.

We are so excited to have Sarah on the show today to learn about her work and life, and for her also to demonstrate the power of resilience.

We are grateful to GE Ventures for their sponsorship today. GE Ventures – Multiple Paths to Big Impact.

Tech Tonics: Stephanie Tilenius – Work, Not Worry Nov 05, 2018

An accomplished investment banker who transitioned to become an accomplished executive at leading tech companies including eBay and Google, Stephanie Tilenius has now set her sights on an even more difficult challenge. As CEO of Vida Health she is focused on improving the health of the chronically ill with evidence-based coaching.

Along her remarkable journey, Stephanie has been guided by wisdom from her father (“work, not worry”) and lessons she’s picked up along the way. She sees a real need in the management of chronic disease, and, at Vida, aims to leverage her experience “building great products” and leading high-performing teams.

Following up on a recent, fascinating discussion with our colleagues at Healthy Dose (see here) Stephanie reiterated in her conversation with us that she viewed her experiences at both Google and eBay as extremely positive, and felt that both companies focused on merit and rewarded performance despite some of the circumstances reported by others. She said that her experiences at these companies — and that of many other women she knew in these organizations– were gratifying ones, even if this isn’t the conventional wisdom about tech companies. She worries more, as an entrepreneur, about the world of VCs, which she thinks eventually care about returns but, in the short run, may value other characteristics that tend to favor male entrepreneurs.

We’re grateful to Stephanie for sharing her inspiring story, and engaging in such a frank discussion around a number of important topics.

Today’s show was sponsored by IDEA pharma, the industry’s leading path-to-market strategy practice, bringing more great medicines to patients. You can find them at:
ideapharma.com

Additional links:

Lisa on the new California bill to ensure female board members: Here, Here.

David’s Forbes piece on this debate: here.

Tech Tonics: Dr. Carla Pugh on Serendipity and the Technology of Touch Oct 22, 2018

Dr. Carla Pugh does a lot of things. She is trauma surgeon, entrepreneur, researcher and educator and is officially a professor of surgery at Stanford University School of Medicine (she also went to UC Berkeley so Go Bears!) and also Director of the Technology-Enabled Clinical Improvement Center at Stanford.

Born into an entrepreneurial home, Carla started helping her mom at age 2 by filing computer punch cards. But she knew she wanted to be a doctor at the age of 5 and, specifically, a cranio-facial reconstructive surgeon at the age of 14 after seeing a movie about Dr. Paul Tessier, a renown cranio-surgical reconstructionist.

Her ultimate role as combination surgeon and entrepreneur grew out of Carla’s experience as a “maker” before that term even existed, handy with tools and determined to fix stuff in life and later in medicine. As a young girl, she didn’t want Barbies, she wanted a soldering iron and set about fixing other kids’ toys.

Today Carla runs a lab at Stanford where all sorts of interesting tools are invented to help physicians train, test their skills, and understand their limitations. Key among these are sensors and devices that provide feedback to physicians about their touch and the way they use their hands, which is key to so many diagnostic procedures. According to Carla, “sensors don’t lie” and doctors tend to believe the computer more than the faculty when it comes to testing skills in simulation labs, a task that not all physicians embrace, particularly when they find out they have been doing standard procedures wrong for years.

Carla says, “My career is a string of serendipitous and magical experiences.” We are delighted to have her on the show to describe them as only she can.

And we are grateful to Medidata for their sponsorship today. Medidata – the Intelligent Platform for Life Sciences that closes the loop between clinical development and commercialization to power smarter treatments and healthier people.

Tech Tonics: Microsoft Global Chief Medical Officer Simon Kos, Using Technology to Light the Future of Medicine Oct 08, 2018

Medical technology thought leader by day, computer gamer by night, Dr. Simon Kos, Global Chief Medical Officer of Microsoft, is a physician, business strategist and technologist who by his own admission is drawn to “bright shiny objects.” But a commitment to make medicine safer and better through technology has been his career guiding light.

Simon, an Australia native, was born into a medical family but didn’t know it was his destiny to follow in the family footsteps. He studied to be an engineer and did become a lover of technology, but eventually the pull of fate was too much and Simon ended up in medical school. Yet he was troubled that the time he spent in the critical care unit was fraught with data-free decision making, which made him realize his ultimate purpose: to use technology to improve medicine. While working to spread electronic medical records, thinking they could be the tool that could make the difference, Simon quickly realized there was a big difference between digitization and transformation. He soon began his journey to discover how to use technology as a true means of change management, eventually landing at Microsoft in Australia and then in the global role.

Simon loves the latest greatest tech breakthroughs, particularly those that first find a place in other industries, and for that reason has found Microsoft such a stimulating environment. His latest interest is in mixed and virtual reality, thinking about how Hololens can contribute to a better healthcare system, among other things.

Simon is also enamored of the latest computer games and spends a lot of time hanging around The Continent, the magical world where Witcher 3 takes place. Witcher 3, for those of you who don’t know, is a very popular open world role playing game where you get to be a monster slayer. Funny that Simon is a doctor focused on healing but loves to play a game that is grisly and violent and surely would deliver people to his critical care unit of old. Perhaps it’s the cool technology combined with the need for human decision making and empathy that reconciles these worlds.

You can hear Simon talk about all of this, plus his view on people with special needs and the positive aspects of neurodiversity. As the father of a child with autism, Simon is a champion of helping all people become their best self in the greater community.

We are delighted to have had Simon on this week’s show!

And we are grateful to Medidata for their sponsorship today. Medidata – the Intelligent Platform for Life Sciences that closes the loop between clinical development and commercialization to power smarter treatments and healthier people.

Tech Tonics: Sometimes You Just Need to Start Things – Marcus Osborne and the Transformational Role of Intrapreneurship Aug 20, 2018

A capitalist colored by a deep streak of social consciousness, Marcus Osborne, the leader of Health Transformation at Walmart, grew up in the South and planned on a political life. But experience in the White House and later at the Clinton Foundation made him realize that entrepreneurship more effectively matched his internal clock speed and that the best path to an improved health system was through the commercial world, particularly where you could parlay large platforms into market power and real innovation.

In fact, Marcus came to the conclusion that the real entrepreneurs aren’t the kids in dorms or at Starbucks, they are the ones turning big platforms to better use. Walmart, Amazon, Google and others, say Marcus, have the best chance to truly change the system.

Marcus joined Walmart in 2007 and has been at the forefront of living that philosophy, working at what is now considered to be one of the organizations best poised to change the way healthcare is consumed, delivered, and financed. While Arkansas isn’t usually considered to be the front line of innovation, when you look at the work that Walmart has done, particularly in healthcare, it’s clearly time to reconsider. Marcus has worked on all sides of the healthcare innovation front while at Walmart, from building new clinical delivery systems to rethinking pharmaceutical pricing to looking at new ways to use data for clinical quality improvement.

Marcus says that transformation is not for the faint of heart or the risk averse and that “sometimes you just need to start things,” meaning that it’s important to take leaps of faith to get ahead in business.

We are grateful to GE Ventures for sponsorship of today’s episode. GE Ventures – Multiple Paths to Big Impact.

Tech Tonics: Sam Blackman, Translation With Heart Aug 06, 2018

Story teller, writer, drug developer – Sam Blackman is all three, a philosophy major who became a pediatric oncologist and then a creative drug developer with a penchant for imaginative solutions to translational challenges.

Although he was the son of a doctor, Sam’s journey to the leading edge of translational research was far from inevitable. His career path took him from the philosophy department at the University of Chicago (where he worked on the side as a computer repairman) to a role a research assistant in an anesthesia lab to a Grand Rounds presentation at the Mayo Clinic, Florida (at the age of 23) and finally to medical school.

Sam seemed on track to become a leading academic pediatric oncologist, but then decided to pursue drug development in biopharma, focusing in particular on translational research, the often hazy but increasingly important interface between laboratory science and clinical trials. He is especially excited about the opportunities generated by emerging tools and technologies.

A gifted writer and a natural story teller, Sam developed a devoted following for the blog he wrote while in Boston, including a deeply moving account of his efforts, ultimately successful, to adopt a baby from Kazakhstan. More recently, he has garnered considerable acclaim for his spoken word stories, delivered as part of the Moth competition in Seattle; links to several of these performances are below.

We’re delighted to welcome Sam to Tech Tonics, and are grateful for the opportunity to share his stories with our listeners.

Today’s show is sponsored by Medidata, whose Intelligent Platform for Life Sciences closes the loop between clinical development and commercialization to power smarter treatments and healthier people.

Tech Tonics: Owen Tripp – Grand Founder Jul 23, 2018

Owen Tripp, Founder and CEO of Grand Rounds, was brought up by parents who taught him that you could do whatever you chose to do and that there was not one clear path to the right door. Owen has taken this to heart, starting adult life as a Spanish major and working his way through tech to healthcare as an avowed entrepreneur, ultimately yielding to the siren song of unbridled optimism present in Silicon Valley.

Owen was an early employee at eBay where, among other things, he became an avowed collector of Wheaties boxes adorned by New England’s greatest athletes. He also became fascinated by entrepreneurship and went on to co-found Reputation.com, a company now serving customers in 100 countries around the world and which he now realizes was well ahead of it’s time.

Owen started Grand Rounds in 2011 and learned the hard way the difficulty of consumer-paid business models in healthcare. He has built a business known for creativity and especially for his leadership, the trait for which he wishes to be most recognized. Owen aspires to create the next “Pay Pal Diaspora” where the leadership of Grand Rounds ultimately goes on to become the next cadre of great leaders of the best of the new supply of healthtech companies.

We are grateful to GE Ventures for sponsorship of today’s episode. GE Ventures: Multiple Paths to Big Impact.

Tech Tonics: Matthew Stoudt – Real Empathy in a Virtual World Jul 11, 2018

He’s one of those tech people that came to healthcare to find a career of significance, but Matthew Stoudt has actually been destined for the health tech world since his youth.

Matthew Stoudt aspired to be a lawyer, then a senator, before he realized he was an entrepreneur at heart. A foundational experience of losing a beloved and accomplished father taught him that he should never waver in pursuing his dreams; that has been his guiding principle since early in his career. He has had highs and lows along the way and has had many interesting work experiences (innovation team of McDonalds, founder of Outcast Media), but has always kept a focus on what his dad taught him about curiosity and the importance of an expansive view of the world. This helped him further his quest to visit every country on earth, as well as amass a combination of entrepreneurial skills and a personal commitment to empathy which have become the perfect recipe to bridge the tech and medical worlds. After a successful exit of Outcast Media to Verifone (we can all thank Matthew for those broadcast flatscreens screens at gas pumps), Matthew realized his next job was meant to involve a more meaningful way of helping people. That, and a chance airplane encounter, led to the founding of AppliedVR with colleagues Josh and David Sackman.

As the CEO of AppliedVR, a company that uses virtual and augmented reality technologies to reduce the pain and suffering of patients, Matthew has tapped into an emerging market opportunity to apply this frontier gaming technology to making a meaningful difference for patients with challenges that are rarely addressed through traditional means. Importantly, the company has applied serious clinical rigor to this effort, developing a strong base of clinical research which has led to adoption of the company’s products at nearly 200 hospitals, building the foundation for a virtual reality “formulary.” And yet, when you speak with Matthew, it’s always about the patients. He cites this as one of the many examples of why and how therapeutic VR can improve outcomes for real people:

We welcome Matthew to Tech Tonics and are delighted to have him on the show.

We are grateful to GE Ventures for sponsorship of today’s episode. GE Ventures: Multiple Paths to Big Impact.

Tech Tonics: Molly Coye’s 360 View of the Healthcare System Jul 09, 2018

Dr. Molly Coye comes from a family who was obsessed with innovation and had a high tolerance for risk. They also had a history of commitment to anything that would disrupt unjust social paradigms and passed that down through the generations. Molly has packed all of these qualities and more into a healthcare career marked by making real change, not just talking about it.

In fact, Molly has worked on all sides of the healthcare system. She has spent many years in governmental leadership roles, been on both the payer and provider side of the table, and in both academic and commercial environments. But Molly has had a consistent theme throughout her career – to make healthcare accessible and relevant for underserved populations and to use technology and data to accelerate that outcome. Today Molly is actively engaged with numerous companies serving the underserved populations about which she has long-cared and she is also a 15-year board member of Aetna and an entrepreneur-in-residence at Avia. But mainly she is the healthcare whisperer, helping entrepreneurs, investors, and corporate executives figure out what actually matters.

Few have the healthcare pedigree that Molly has, with joint public health and medical degrees from Johns Hopkins, and a career that spans health systems such as SF General Hospital, Good Samaritan and UCLA, where she was Chief Innovation Officer; governmental leadership roles such as Commissioner of Health in New Jersey and Director of the California Department of Health and a gig at the CDC in the 1970’s where she was among the first to lug around a massive Osborne portable computer into the field in Asia. She tells a story about the helicopter pilots who ferried her around saying that they “love to see a little lady flying with her sewing machine.” Molly has also been an entrepreneur in the health technology field, first at HealthDesk and then as the founder of HealthTech, which was established in 2000 to help health systems figure out how to deal with rapidly evolving technology. Molly is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine and also serves on the newly created Founder’s Council of United States of Care.

In addition to all this, Molly is a fluent Chinese speaker and has published two books about Chinese history. She also is a member of the board of directors of San Francisco Jazz (SFJAZZ), and has scuba dived all over the world.

We are so thrilled to have Molly on Tech Tonics today!

We are grateful to GE Ventures for sponsorship of today’s episode. GE Ventures: Multiple Paths to Big Impact.

Tech Tonics: From Maine to Mainstream – The Noah Craft Story Jun 25, 2018

Raised in a small town in Maine, and passionate about infectious diseases in the developing world, Noah Craft may not seem like your typical health tech entrepreneur – but on today’s show, we’ll hear how he’s channeled his passions into Science37, a high-flying startup the brings clinical trials to patients.”

Growing up, Noah might have admired the doctor in his hometown – but his hometown didn’t have a doctor, so he looked up to the doctor who ran the solo practice in the neighboring town, and started to envision himself as physician himself.

During college, he discovered translational research and began to consider a career at the interface of science and medicine. He started a MD/PhD program at UCLA, but as he was became increasingly immersed in the laboratory component, he faced a crisis of purpose, asking himself why he was doing this. He stepped away and traveled around Mexico, ultimately returning with a renewed sense of conviction.

After gaining experiences leading clinical trials himself, and developing expertise with both enterprise computing and telemedicine (acquiring what he calls “website manner”) , Noah then integrated all these capabilities in a new company called Science37, delivering clinical trials via smart phones and pioneering the concept of virtual/site-less clinical trial. The company has earned partnerships with a number of leading pharma companies, including Novartis, whose CEO took to twitter to promote “our alliance with @Science_37” and the launch of “site-less trials” that will enable researchers to “gather deeper insights into the patient experience that will drive medical innovation.”

We are delighted that welcome Noah to today’s show!

This episode of Tech Tonics is sponsored by GE Ventures: Multiple Paths to Big Impact.

Tech Tonics: Amalio Telenti, International Man of (Genetic) Mystery May 21, 2018

In the course of his fascinating career, physician-scientist Amalio Telenti has had the opportunity to work in two imiscible centers of excellence in genomics: Eric Lander’s Broad Institute and Craig Venter’s Human Longevity Institute (HLI); on today’s show, we’ll learn what he’s taken away from these two exceptional and distinct organizations – and why he’s so grateful for both experience.

Born in Spain to a long line of physicians, Amalio chose to become (wait for it) a physician, completing his internal medicine and infectious disease training at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN. He then returned to Europe, and conducted what he’s described as some of the most impactful research of his life, elucidating the genes underlying multi-drug resistant tuberculosis; the laboratory test used today for this infection is based on Amalio’s original discovery.

Amalio’s career led him back and forth across the Atlantic several times, including a Sabbatical year at the Broad Institute and Harvard. Several years later, Amalio met Craig Venter, and after a whirlwind courtship – Amalio was persuaded to gather up his family and join Venter’s new enterprise, HLI. A few weeks later Amalio was on his way to Southern California, to start what he’s described as a “wild ride.” Today, Amalio is a professor focused on genomics and data science at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla. #Winning.

Today’s show is sponsored by DNAnexus, the secure and compliant cloud platform that enables enterprise users to analyze, collaborate around, and integrate massive amounts of genetic and other health data.

Tech Tonics: Scott Barclay of Data Collective, Journeying Down the Data Stream May 07, 2018

Scott Barclay is a nearly ubiquitous presence around the healthcare IT world, standing at the intersection of technology and health since 2005. He has journeyed down the data stream from CVS to startup whisperer to venture capital investor over the last several years, always searching for ways to combine information and empathy.

But it wasn’t always so. Scott started out in a small town in rural Virginia, the child of the first female engineer at Auburn University (who was also the first female pilot in Florida) and an entrepreneur who owned and operated a Styrofoam factory. Scott was supposed to turn a coveted Presidential appointment to West Point into a military future. Instead he left town and signed himself up for a liberal arts education at UVA and never looked back.

Though he started his career in finance, traveling throughout the US and Europe for Montgomery Securities in its heyday, then joining Boston Consulting Group (BCG), Scott ended up taking a job at BCG client CVS having heard the siren song of health IT. Scott has been wading knee-deep in the health technology and entrepreneurial scene ever since, working with numerous companies including Syapse, naviHealth, Lumiata and the precursor to Propeller Health (Asthmapolis), among many others.

Recently Scott became an investment partner at venture capital firm Data Collective after a stint as operating partner at the firm. He loves technology but firmly believes that “it’s not about the technology.” The real question is ‘what is the simplest thing that solves a problem,’” cautioning health tech entrepreneurs not to fall to in love with their own handywork. Scott firmly believes that his liberal arts background is what enables him to keep his focus on empathy and outcome before AI and other technologies du jour. It is this zeitgeist that he seeks to impart to the four children he and his wife are raising in the thick of Silicon Valley.

We are delighted to have Scott on Tech Tonics today!

We are grateful to GE Ventures for sponsorship of today’s episode. GE Ventures: Multiple Paths to Big Impact.

Tech Tonics: Eric Leuthardt… neurosurgeon, inventor, playwright, book author, clothing designer and father of two Apr 23, 2018

Eric Leuthardt, MD, is quite the Renaissance Man. An accomplished neurosurgeon, inventor, playwright, book author, clothing designer and father of two, Eric has built a career with and around brains in a way no one would have imagined early in his life. Teachers thought he was a slow learner, but it turns out they just weren’t yet capturing his imagination. When, as a teen, he got an opportunity to work in the lab of neuroscientist Keith Crutcher (his mom wanted him to do something), the spark was lit.

Today Eric is an accomplished neurosurgeon and professor of neurosurgery and biomedical and mechanical engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also leads the Center for Innovation in Neuroscience and Technology and the Brain Laser Center. He is also the inventor of a myriad of healthcare products and has over 1700 issues and pending patents, including some for a variety of brain-computer interface technologies that enable people to control computers with their thoughts alone. He has started six companies from the technologies he has invented. Among his inventions are the underlying technology that drives Pear Therapeutics, robotic exoskeleton that helps stroke victims recover hand movement by helping the brain rewire itself, and neurostimulation product that can treat depression and other mental health conditions through ear buds.

But, as they say on the infomercials, that’s not all! Eric has written two non-fiction techno- thrillers that capture the excitement and anxiety of the future of mind-machine interface (available on Amazon). He has also written and acted in a play called Brain Works: Your Mind On Life, which is about how the brain operates in day to day situations (falling in love, having children, fear of dying, etc). The play won an Emmy and Eric is now collaborating with PBS on his next story. And to top it all off, Eric even has a clothing line that features neuroscience-related designs. Eric is also the single parent to two young children. Lisa met Eric when they were both Fellows in the Aspen Institute Health Innovation inaugural class, and she has been fortunate to get to know him better over the years. Since Eric is quite confident that the near future will bring minimally invasive neuro implants to make people smarter, she is hanging around him to be sure she is first in line.

Thanks to Eric for joining us on Tech Tonics today!

We are grateful to GE Ventures for sponsorship of today’s episode. GE Ventures: Multiple Paths to Big Impact.

For more information see:
Eric Leuthardt’s Video Blog
Eric Leuthardt’s Personal Blog on Psychology Today
Full Play of Brain Works by Eric Leuthardt

Tech Tonics: Katherine Chou – How A Quintessential Googler Wraps Her (Deep) Mind Around Healthcare Apr 09, 2018

Katherine Chou is in many ways the quintessential Googler – super smart, a passion for computer science, an engineer through and through. On today’s episode of Tech Tonics, we’ll learn how this rock star at Google decided to turn her talents to healthcare, and hear what she’s discovered about healthcare, and herself, along the way.

The daughter of two aerospace engineers, Katherine had her first computer (a 32 bit Amiga 1000) when she was four, and apparently figured out how to program it not long after that. A whiz kid, she seems to have excelled in most everything in and out of the classroom. She took math and science courses in college while still in high school, while also pursuing piano, ballet, tae kwon do, and Science Olympiad, among other pastimes.

She attended Stanford, where she double-majored in economics and computer science (CS), which she discovered was her true passion. She continued on to a Masters in CS at Stanford, and after an initial role at Microsoft – which she chose because she wanted to manage, and not just code – she joined Google (pre-IPO) in 2004, and has been there ever since, in roles of increasing responsibility. Today, she Head of Product for Health Research and Medical Brain, and closely involved with many of the high profile efforts (such as analyses of retinopathy and of EHR records) that have attracted so much popular attention.

On today’s show, Katherine shares her vision and her passion, as well as the (very structured) approach she’s taken to many of the key choices she’s faced along the way. We are delighted to welcome Katherine to Tech Tonics!

Today’s episode is sponsored by DNAnexus, the secure and compliant cloud platform that enables enterprise users to analyze, collaborate around, and integrate massive amounts of genetic and other health data.

Tech Tonics: O-K K-A-R-D-I-A, The Dave Albert Story Mar 19, 2018

Although his dad was a prominent politician who eventually became Speaker of the House, AliveCor Founder Dave Albert always knew he wanted to a career in medicine – it was the passion he discovered for engineering and entrepreneurship that took him, and his career, by surprise.

While Dave chose a very different path than his father Carl, their paths crossed when Dave was in medical school, and his father suffered a heart attack; during his recovery, he was told to walk until his heart rate hit 120 bpm. Dave figured this should be easy to measure, yet when a colleague’s effort fell profoundly short, Dave decided he wanted to be able to figure out these sorts of problems for himself, and took a three year detour into engineering.

While he finished medical school and part of an internal medicine residency, the draw of medical devices, and entrepreneurship couldn’t be contained. It lead to the founding of several companies, including most recently, AliveCor, which uses the iPhone to enable individuals to record EKG rhythm strips in an FDA-approved fashion, mediated through an app called Kardia.

We’re delighted to welcome Dave to TechTonics today, and learn how this Oklahoma native has taken Silicon Valley by storm.

Today’s show is sponsored by DNAnexus, the secure and compliant cloud platform that enables enterprise users to analyze, collaborate around, and integrate massive amounts of genetic and other health data.

Tech Tonics: Lisa Alderson and her Long and Winding Road to Genomics Mar 05, 2018

For a skydiver who’s motto is “Just jump out and go”, the journey from chasing down Sandanista kidnappers to driving Disney strategy to genomics pioneer sounds sort of rational. Lisa Alderson, founder and CEO of Genome Medical, is one of those special someones who thrives on adrenaline and channels it to great effect.

Lisa went pretty far down the journalism path. She founded Campus TV while at Colorado State University and it is still a going concern. She worked as a foreign correspondent for CNN, CBS and others and even interned with Dan Rather. But in the end, she was more drawn to entrepreneurship than ratings and headed down the startup road, entering during the tech bubble. She was at the first well known tech incubator, IdeaLab, and then joined a series of tech startups, none of which went exactly right.

When Lisa was looking for her next gig, the venture capitalist who had backed her last tech company connected her up with Randy Scott, who was starting Genomic Health. And from there Lisa found her calling in the ability to to blend her passion for building things with an ability do well by doing good.

Together Lisa and Randy went on to start Invitae, another genomics testing company powerhouse. Since good things come in threes, the two of them have now co-founded Genome Medical, a tech enabled services startup that delivers expertise and services that support both physician and patient genetic needs. The company is essentially a one-stop, coast-to-coast specialty medical practice solely dedicated to genomic medicine, providing decision support around genetics test ordering and tele-counseling to patients about readiness and results. (Note: Genome Medical is a GE Ventures portfolio company). In a world where genetics testing is exploding, Lisa has found her calling helping the healthcare world, especially patients, make sense of it all.

We are grateful to GE Ventures for sponsorship of today’s episode. GE Ventures – Multiple Paths to Big Impact.

Tech Tonics: Gini Deshpande, @biotechfounder Feb 19, 2018

The daughter of a commercial airline pilot and the oldest of two kids, Gini Deshpande grew up in Mumbai and told her parents that by the time she was forty, she wanted to own her own car, house, and company. Check, check, and check.

After completing college and a competitive masters program in molecular biology in India, she turned down a full scholarship there in order to continue her studies in the United States, at Purdue specifically. Gini has pointed out that Purdue is in the heartland and thus an amusing place for a vegetarian to reside.

Gini figured out pretty quickly that she didn’t want to be an academic, and was especially interested in translation, a way of thinking that she says “didn’t resonate with the purist mindset” present in much of academia. She adds, “if you want to think about application, it’s considered a big no-no.”

A pivotal experience in the tech transfer office at Children’s Hospital in Boston helped launch her on a path towards entrepreneurship, ultimately leading to her role as Founder and CEO of NuMedii, which seeks to use multi-omics and artificial intelligence to drive drug discovery.

A high-profile biotech entrepreneur (a role that’s reflected even in her twitter handle: @biotechfounder), Gini has been a particularly impassioned champion of mentorship, for entrepreneurs in general, and for female entrepreneurs in particular.

We are delighted welcome Gini to Tech Tonics!

We are grateful to our sponsor, DNAnexus, for support of today’s show. DNAnexus is the secure and compliant cloud platform that enables enterprise users to analyze, collaborate around, and integrate massive amounts of genetic and other health data.

Tech Tonics: Patients are why technology matters Feb 05, 2018

Deborah DiSanzo had a plan. She was going to be a stockbroker and make a ton of money to rise out of the rough circumstances of her childhood and make it big. When she realized she hated the role, but loved programming, she cast around for a new way to exercise her tech skills. Despite a series of setbacks as tech company after tech company didn’t quite make it, Deborah found herself as a product manager at Apollo with a bunch of technology looking for a new use case. Armed with 250 computers, a blank slate and a team of neurophysiologists at University of Pittsburgh who needed better ways to make decisions, Deborah found her true love, the use of technology to make medicine better.

While Deborah has been a leader in the health IT field for nearly 30 years, it was a flight attendant named Bridget who gave her effort real purpose and drove home how important it is to build around patient need. Bridget was one of the very first people to benefit from a defibrillator placed on airplanes by Deborah’s then division at HP – Heartstream. Flying home from her Heartstream training, Bridget went into cardiac arrest and was saved by the device and was able to thank Deborah personally after a Congressional hearing about defibrillators in public locales.

Deborah saw the AI movement coming and found her way to IBM. Today Deborah is the General Manager leading IBM Watson Health. Having used the technology to help navigate the three different treatment plans recommended by three different physicians for her own breast cancer experience, Deborah believes that AI and related technologies are essential to make a difference in a system with far too many medical mistakes.

We are delighted to have Deborah on Tech Tonics today.

We are grateful to our sponsor, DNAnexus, for support of today’s show. DNAnexus is the secure and compliant cloud platform that enables enterprise users to analyze, collaborate around, and integrate massive amounts of genetic and other health data.

Tech Tonics: A Brief History of Iya Khalil Jan 22, 2018

Iya Khalil is a woman who’s always been ahead of her time. In middle school she was captivated by the writing of Stephen Hawking. After graduating school at Cornell with a PhD in physics, while colleagues were heading to Wall Street to be quants or to Silicon Valley to launch the next Webvan, she was captivated by AI and its potential to inform the study of biology and the care of patients.

In 2000, with Colin Hill, she co-founded GNS Healthcare, a company that, eighteen years later, remains true to its original mission and provides insight to payors and biopharma companies through a proprietary analytic approach.

We are delighted to welcome Iya to the program today, and discuss her captivating journey, her views of the evolution of AI, and her experiences as a tech entrepreneur who is also an Arab American Muslim. Through it all Iya brings not only an incisive mind but also her remarkable and distinct combination of real-world pragmatism and engaging optimism. It is a pleasure to have her on Tech Tonics!

Today’s episode of Tech Tonics is sponsored by GE Ventures; GE Ventures – Multiple Paths to Big Impact.

Tech Tonics: David Van Sickle, Drummer… Digital Health Pioneer Jan 08, 2018

Tech Tonics has shared many stories of digital health pioneers who were passionate about health and computers from a young age, and fell effortlessly into a career at the interface of these interests.

David Van Sickle, on the other hand, was most passionate about drumming. When he graduated from University of California, Santa Barbara, David dove into the Bay Area music scene, taking work in an (otherwise) all female punk band, the Sisters of Confusion, while trying (with only limited success) to ignite his career as a jazz drummer.

While living in the East Bay, he audited a Berkeley course in anthropology, which ultimately led him to put his drumming ambitions on hold to pursue an anthropology PhD in Tucson, Arizona. In the course of this work, he studied the epidemiology of asthma in diverse populations, including Native American populations in New Mexico and Alaska, and also communities in India.

And this led to David’s first “professional” job at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The CDC role led to an interest in improved approaches to asthma surveillance, a passion that, in turn, led to a Robert Wood Johnson Fellowship in Madison, Wisconsin and ultimately to his starting one of the first digital health companies, Asthmapolis. Asthmapolis was later renamed Propeller Health and is today lauded as one of the success stories on the digital health frontier. Politico recently profiled a fascinating community-based study enabled by the company in Louisville, Kentucky.

We are delighted to welcome David Van Sickle to our show.

Today’s episode is sponsored by DNAnexus, the secure and compliant cloud platform that enables enterprise users to analyze, collaborate around, and integrate massive amounts of genetic and other health data.

Tech Tonics: Amir Dan Rubin, Change Agent Dec 18, 2017

A self-proclaimed optimist who calls himself “a change-agent with a funny foreign name,” Amir Dan Rubin has spent his career shaping and reshaping healthcare delivery systems. Today, Amir is the CEO of One Medical, a company focused on making primary care personal, accessible, and affordable. Amir joined One Medical after a brief stint at Optum and a much longer, and some would say transformative, stint as CEO of Stanford Health Care, among other comparable roles.

Amir grew up in Los Angeles, the child of Israeli parents. It was always his dream, even from childhood, to be a businessman because “it seemed very American.” Admitting he had no idea what being in business even meant, he accidentally found his way into the healthcare business through a random college elective and he has remained there ever since.

We are grateful to GE Ventures for sponsorship of today’s episode. GE Ventures – Multiple Paths to Big Impact.

Tech Tonics: Daphne Koller – Guiding Health From AI to Actual Intelligence Dec 04, 2017

While most of us spent our early teens dealing with the drama of middle school, Daphne Koller was in Israel simultaneously completing high school and college. She was a computer science prodigy on the fast path to a career as a leading AI researcher, an entrepreneur, and now the Chief Computing Officer at Calico, a stealthy, brainy, well-funded startup focused on human longevity.

Along the way, Daphne picked up a MacArthur “Genius” Award and co-founded the online teaching company Coursera – two remarkable accomplishments that we don’t have time to discuss on today’s show. Instead, we learn about her fascinating personal journey from Israel to the Bay Area, then spend most of our time getting up to speed on the current state of AI, and learn where, why, and when it’s likely to palpably impact healthcare.

Of particular interest, Daphne discusses the need for folk who are “bilingual” – who deeply understand both AI and healthcare; such domain knowledge, Daphne says, is critically important, and associated with the development of algorithms that perform the best. We discuss the challenge of balancing the benefits of incorporating domain expertise with the concern that in doing so you might introduce your own preconceived biases.

Today’s episode is brought to you by DNAnexus, the secure and compliant cloud platform that enables enterprise users to analyze, collaborate around, and integrate massive amounts of genetic and other health data.

Tech Tonics: Dawn Meyerriecks – Bringing the Fail Fast Thinking of Silicon Valley to the CIA Nov 20, 2017

In what might be one of the coolest government roles you could find, Dawn Meyerriecks job is to bring the latest and greatest science and technology to the Central Intelligence Agency –she gets to be a modern day Q in a world of data, drones and DNA.

Dawn’s path to technology and intrigue was anything but obvious in her early years when she aspired to be a pianist. But after an overly critical teacher told her that her playing was merely “adequate,” she made a left turn into engineering and never looked back.

Throughout her career Dawn has moved fluidly between the public and private sector, making stops at TRW and AOL; at the latter, she says, her job was putting the Internet on training wheels for people like her mom. In the end her “service gene” won out and Dawn made her way to her current position as Deputy Director of the CIA for Science and Technology, a role that most would seem more suited than one who looks like Harrison Ford than a master gardener.

Today Dawn dwells in a world of cybersecurity, bioterrorism, and artificial intelligence of all types in a quest to keep our country safe. She says, “Technology is ambivalent – it can be used for good or evil.”

It was such a pleasure to feature Dawn on Tech Tonics today, even though David and I know we are now being watched.

We are grateful to GE Ventures for sponsorship of today’s episode. GE Ventures – Multiple Paths to Big Impact.

Tech Tonics: Ken Tarkoff – Back to the Future of Medicine in a Brave New World of Data Nov 06, 2017

We have had numerous guests on Tech Tonics who went to medical school only to find their way into non-medical roles. But Ken Tarkoff, whose original career plan was to follow his father into medicine, chose the long way.

Ken took the road to the dark side early into investment banking, joining a pretty legendary team at Montgomery Securities; he had a foray into venture capital where he got to see the making of the entrepreneurial sausage from the other side. And he worked in healthcare companies that were, in the 80’s and 90’s, building businesses around case rates, capitated risk, narrow networks all the various healthcare payment models that are back in vogue today – a true exercise in back to the future thinking. But in the end, it all brought Ken back to medicine, where he is now CEO of Syapse, Inc. a company working to leverage data and doctors in a brave new world of medicine and monetization models (Note: Syapse is an investment of GE Ventures).

Syapse is square in the mix of a large field of companies capitalizing on the marriage of technology, genomics and health data – a triple play that would give the Houston Astros a run for their money. But with so many companies in the precision medicine field looking like well-funded science experiments, there are only a handful doing things that are truly actionable today at the individual patient level. Ken joined Syapse because he felt it a meaningful way of translating his childhood goal of being a doctor into an oncologist’s trusted asset and plan to make a difference for patients at scale.

Ken notes that a key learning from all of his experience on both sides of the board room is this: “Yes, team is essential. But you can have an A management team and a B concept and you will still fail. You have to build a company to scale from the very beginning and start on the journey from a great idea to a mature operation from the first day.”

Thanks to Ken for joining us on Tech Tonics today.

We are grateful to GE Ventures for sponsorship of today’s episode. GE Ventures scales ideas and grows companies that advance industries and improve lives.

Tech Tonics: Atul Butte – When it Comes to Data, More is More Oct 23, 2017

An infectiously exuberant champion of science, sharing, and entrepreneurship, Atul Butte is the Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg Distinguished Professor at the UCSF School of Medicine. Among the questions we explore on this episode of Tech Tonics: can the irresistible force of Atul Butte overcome the immovable object of health data silos?

Atul was born on Long Island, and grew up in New Jersey; he describes his parents as very “technology-supportive,” and (after “borrowing” time on computers at department stores), his first computer was an Apple II plus, which he taught himself how to program. He attended Brown University for both college and medical school, studying computer science and discovering a knack for entrepreneurship, inspired by several unusually exciting summer internships, including Microsoft and Apple.

After continuing his training in pediatrics and pediatric endocrinology at Children’s Hospital in Boston and picking up a PhD in bioinformatics in the Health Sciences and Technology program at Harvard/MIT, where he was mentored by previous Tech Tonics guest Zak Kohane (episode here), he moved out west, and joined the faculty at Stanford, rapidly developing a name for himself as a biomedical leader extracting insights from very large, often public, datasets. When David was in graduate school, he learned from his mentor that “more is more”; Atul clearly takes this principle to the next level. In April 2015, Atul moved from Palo Alto up 280 to the city, to his current role at UCSF.

In this episode, we also discuss entrepreneurship as core part of translational mission (even/especially in academia), the tradeoffs between data quantity and quality (“democratizing data” vs Dennis Miller’s “two of crap of crap”), whether data is the new oil or the new soil, the good and bad of consumer rating of healthcare providers, and whether, paradoxically, people may get “numbered out” and increasingly rely on brand perception.

We are delighted to welcome Atul Butte to Tech Tonics!

This episode is brought to you by DNAnexus, the secure and compliant cloud platform that enables enterprise users to analyze, collaborate around, and integrate massive amounts of genetic and other health data.

Additional Links:

“Digital Health is Dead” post here.

Maker Faire: here.

Entrepreneurship as translational vehicle – David in Forbes here.

Need to train med students in entrepreneurship – David in Nature Biotechnology here, Forbes here, here.

Need for palpable application to drive (health) tech adoption – David in Forbes here.

Tech Tonics: Amy Abernethy – Dosage, Disney & Data Sep 25, 2017

If anyone can bridge the gap between technology and health, it just might be Amy Abernethy , oncologist and technologist, who has led the charge, first at Duke and now at Flatiron, for rethinking the way we collect and analyze clinical information.

Born in Houston and raised by her mom in Orlando, Amy learned math by helping her mom write a textbook, “Dosage Calculation,” for nursing students. The book became the gold standard (now in it’s ninth edition) – and Amy is a co-author.

Her interest in math and science clearly took; she attended math camp (with co-host David) at Duke while in middle school, and also programmed computers for NASA.

After college at Penn, she attended medical school at Duke, and apparently really liked Durham, staying there for the rest of her medical training (internal medicine, oncology), then joining the faculty, focusing on how to improve the way oncology data are collected. (She did spend a few years in Australia doing her graduate work in evidence-based medicine and clinical research methods.)

In 2014, Amy joined New York-Based Flatiron Health as SVP and CMO, though she continues to live in Durham, and commutes to Manhattan weekly. We are delighted to welcome this clinician, scholar, executive – and former Disney Can-Can dancer (tune in for details)– to Tech Tonics.

This episode of Tech Tonics is sponsored by DNAnexus, the secure and compliant cloud platform that enables enterprise users to analyze, collaborate around, and integrate massive amounts of genetic and other health data.

And for some additional reading….
Dosage Calculation (9th Edition) by Pickar & Abernethy on Amazon here.
David’s reflections on math camp: Forbes post here, video here.
Interview with Lisa on diversity in Silicon Valley here.
Publication by Amy on challenges of using EHR data in oncology here.
Amy’s 2013 TEDMED talk on clinical data here.
Walt Disney News 1990 on Pleasure Island here.

Tech Tonics: Chris Cassel, Accidental Doctor to Ultimate Physician Leader Sep 11, 2017

Dr. Christine Cassel never set out to be a doctor but a chance encounter between a kindly navy corpsman and her unexpectedly broken leg took her down the road to medicine. Over the years she has undergone an evolution from “Accidental Doctor” to the one of the nation’s most accomplished and recognized physician leaders, after an early experience at “shared decision making.”

Currently Chris is the Planning Dean of the Kaiser Permanente School of Medicine, a new medical school which will start its first class in 2019. Chris’ unique approach to modernizing medical education is rooted in her fundamental belief that “medicine is moral philosophy in action” and Chris is working hard to ensure that the next generation of physicians comes from that place, armed with healthy doses of both data and humanity. A key proponent of the “let technology flourish” approach to medicine, Chris is on a mission to ensure that newly minted physicians use the latest diagnostic, preventive and personalized technological solutions to enhance the patient experience and improve outcomes across the board, but especially among the geriatric and chronically ill population base with a full recognition of the importance of the social determinants of health and the importance of rational spending.

Her path on this journey has included stints as President and CEO of the National Quality Forum, as well as President and first female CEO of the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) and the ABIM Foundation. Chris was one of 20 scientists chosen by President Obama to serve on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. And that is only a start to the list of career steps that led her to become a leading national expert in geriatric medicine, medical ethics, health policy and quality of care.

Among the programs Chris is most well-known for starting is Choosing Wisely, an effort to bring accountability and scientific validity to medical diagnosis process by ensuring the right tests are done at the right time for the right patients. Choosing Wisely is a joint initiative of the ABIM Foundation and Consumer Reports and provides a forum for over 500 medical specialty societies to define unnecessary services that are no longer supported by evidence-based best practices and to educate physicians and consumers about more appropriate alternatives. If anyone could get 500 medical specialty societies to collaborate, it is Chris.

She is also excited that her legacy will include leadership towards the passage of the Over the Counter Hearing Aid Act, a new law that will remove the onerous restrictions that limit access to hearing aids for older adults. Considering that hearing impairment leads to serious and costly medical issues including depression, social isolation and, potentially even dementia, this is an essential tool in helping the vast population of seniors live fuller, better lives.

We are grateful to AARP Market Innovation for sponsoring this episode of TechTonics. AARP’s Market Innovation team works to spark innovation in the market that will benefit the quality of life for people over 50.

Tech Tonics: Rachel Francine and the Many Applications of Music Therapy Aug 28, 2017

For many, music as medicine has long been put in that category of things that seem nice but not like “real medicine” We all know that music can make us feel better individually, but there is an accumulating body of scientific evidence demonstrating the clinical value of structured music therapy. The world is beginning to heed the tune of companies like SingFit (aka Musical Technologies, Inc.), led by Rachel Francine, who are seizing to the opportunity to deliver digital therapeutics with a musical twist. As Rachel says, “I look at SingFit as a pharmaceutical (digi-ceutical) company that has one molecule that we can configure to provide treatments for a variety of medical conditions. And we get to customize it Bob Dylan and Pharrell. “

The whole idea of music as medicine has been around for millennia, but finally we are seeing more significant programs and companies dedicated to making it mainstream. Rachel has had this idea in her family since childhood. Her career is the melting pot of her family’s interests in music and entrepreneurship and digital entertainment, and her company, like so many in healthcare, was inspired by a personal experience – in this case her co-founder and brother Andy’s discovery that music was making a difference in the recovery of a friend with brain injury (Andy was sneaking into his hospital room and playing guitar for his friend). And, of course, there was Rachel’s experience working in the family karaoke business that fed the stream that led to SingFit.

We are starting to see numerous major health systems invest actively in music therapy programs to address dementia, Alzheimer’s, brain injury, pain, behavioral health, cardiovascular disease and numerous other conditions, with SingFit leading the way. Functional MRI studies and other scientific research have demonstrated both impact and value, driving greater willingness to pay for this approach to treatment.

We are grateful to AARP for sponsoring this episode of TechTonics. AARP’s Market Innovation team works to spark innovation in the market that will benefit the quality of life for people over 50.

Tech Tonics: While Designing the Clinic of the Future In New York, Joel Dudley Remains a Cheesehead at Heart Aug 14, 2017

From the frozen tundra of Wisconsin, to the desert of Arizona, to the Eden that is Palo Alto, to his current home in the greatest city on earth, Joel Dudley has followed his interests and instincts to become a pioneer in the thoughtful application of data science to biology and medicine.

In this episode of Tech Tonics, Joel discusses not only his fascinating journey, but also his current work at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York – the hospital where David Shaywitz was born almost exactly five decades ago – and where today Joel leads the Institute for Next Generation Healthcare, an ambitious effort that’s essentially trying to sculpt the data-inhaling clinic of the future.

We also examine some of the unusual twists and turns of his journey, including the role of remarkable (and remarkably generous) mentors (Atul Butte in particular), and the impact of Crohn’s Disease (which he has) in shaping his interdisciplinary perspective. We also learn about the experiences Joel has had as scientist, proud of his midwestern roots, living among the coastal elites (tl;dr: ready availability of takeout is a plus).

Today’s episode is brought to you by DNAnexus, the secure and compliant cloud platform that enables enterprise users to analyze, collaborate around, and integrate massive amounts of genetic and other health data.

You can find references from the podcast in these additional links:

AI and healthcare: David’s May 2017 take on the clinic of the future.

Orgasmatron (sadly not yet a component of Joel’s “Clinic of the Future”): clip

NIH Toolbox (for cognitive function) – link here

Incidentalome (instant classic paper from Kohane et al) – here

US Climate data: Oshkosh, WI; Palo Alto, CA

Brett Favre on Wheaties Cereal Box – here

Tech Tonics: Jeff Reid and the Impassioned Pursuit Of Bad Music and Great Science Jul 24, 2017

From tinkering with computers as a kid, to matriculating at Johns Hopkins while his peers were entering 11th grade, to his PhD in physics, to his current work at drug discovery at Regeneron, Jeff Reid has always embraced his inner nerd.

Today, Jeff is head of genomics informatics at the Regeneron Genetics Center (RGC), which he describes as “an academic genome center embedded inside of a pharma company.” The RGC combines Electronic Health Record (EHR) data from consented patients at Geisinger (a foundational partner in this project, and described by Jeff as “absolutely visionary”) and other medical centers with genetic (exome) data the RGC generates from these patients; it then integrates these data (utilizing – disclosure – the DNAnexus platform) to generate and prioritize drug targets. So far, it seems to be working phenomenally well based on the work published in top tier journals and presented at prominent scientific conferences. And much of the credit belongs to Jeff.

On today’s show, we review Jeff’s multifaceted journey – from physics to genetics and from Seattle to New York, as well as his experiences as an openly gay leader in industry. We’ll also discuss Jeff’s terrible taste in music and exceptional taste in cocktails, and learn where to get the best mixed drink in Houston (spoiler alert: it’s Anvil).

This episode of Tech Tonics is sponsored by DNAnexus, the secure and compliant cloud platform that enables enterprise users to analyze, collaborate around, and integrate massive amounts of genetic and other health data.

Tech Tonics: Margaret Laws, Where Non-Profit & For-Profit Healthcare Innovation Collide Jul 10, 2017

Margaret Laws has been working at the intersection of the for-profit and not-for-profit healthcare world for many years. This world has had an explosion of activity to find solutions to major public health and personal health challenges; according to Margaret, these worlds are beginning to blur and the newest foundations and non-profits are actively trying to bring the resources and discipline of private business sector to the big problems we are facing in the social sector. Her life’s work has been to straddle both of these worlds and try to bring them together.

Today Margaret is CEO of HopeLab, an Omidyar Group entity, focused on improving the health and well-being of kids by creating engaging technologies backed by rigorous research. They rely on a combination of rigorous science, user-centered design and strategic partnerships to drive broad impact. The organization works on a wide variety of themes that benefit from the intersection of technology and health, from early childhood health to the mental health of teens. Margaret is well known in the venture capital world as well, having led the California Health Care Foundation for many years. She is driven by a curiosity to keep learning and a passion for improving how people live and thrive.

We are grateful to our sponsor, AARP Market Innovation. for supporting this episode of Tech Tonics. AARP Market Innovation, which works to spark innovation in the market that will benefit the quality of life for people over 50.

Tech Tonics: Deneen Vojta – Skating to Where the Healthcare Puck is Going Jun 19, 2017

Deneen Vojta has played virtually every possible position in the healthcare world. She has at various times been a physician, an entrepreneur and a payer. Today it’s a hat trick, bringing all three of these roles together to bring new clinically valid, evidence-based technologies and services to patients through her current role as Executive Vice President of Enterprise R&D for United Health Group.

Deneen has long been out there ahead of the pack, whether serving as the first female meat slicer at Greenman’s Deli or starting the first direct-to-consumer pediatric and family obesity-prevention technology company long before it was cool. Today she is charged with solving the nation’s biggest healthcare challenges from what is arguably one of the nation’s largest platforms. And skating to where the puck is going is exactly what drives a rabid hockey fan like Deneen.
We are delighted to host Deneen on Tech Tonics today.

We are grateful to our sponsor, AARP Market Innovation. for supporting this episode of Tech Tonics. AARP Market Innovation, which works to spark innovation in the market that will benefit the quality of life for people over 50.

Tech Tonics: Zak Kohane On Medicine and Computers Jun 05, 2017

The son of Eastern European immigrants, Zak Kohane was born and raised in Switzerland; he then came to the United States where he’s nurtured a passion for medicine and computers to become one of the nation’s leading thinkers, innovators, and mentors at this important and rapidly evolving interface.

Join us this week as we discuss Zak’s fascinating personal journey, but also learn his perspective on why EHRs are so bad (and what might be done to improve them), why data sharing seems to be so difficult (and how it could be made better), why he championed entrepreneurship at Harvard long before it was viewed as a (somewhat) acceptable pursuit, and why he recently founded the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard (where co-host David serves as an Adjunct Scholar).

Zak also discusses the value of great mentors, such as Joe Majzoub and the late Judah Folkman, both of Children’s Hospital, and explore Folkman’s explanation of the difference between persistence and obstinance.

Zak brings a unique blend of technological sophistication and impassioned humanism to everything he pursues; we are delighted he joins us this episode to share this insight and energy with our listeners!

This episode of Tech Tonics is sponsored by DNAnexus, the secure and compliant cloud platform that enables enterprise users to analyze, collaborate around, and integrate massive amounts of genetic and other health data.

Tech Tonics: Glen de Vries – A Series Of Quite Fortunate Events May 23, 2017

Glen de Vries grew up in Manhattan, a nerdy kid who admired Richard Feynman, loved his TRS-80, and went to Carnegie Mellon University planning to study chemistry and computer science. A summer of molecular biology inspired him to switch his major to biology and, after graduation, he found himself in a lab at Columbia University trying to help a productive distributed research team organize their data.

The geek in Glen was sure there must be a better way and, in partnership with Tarek Sherif, he co-founded a cloud-based clinical research company, Medidata Solutions, in 1999. Over the last eighteen years Medidata has become a leading player in the clinical trials market; the New York-based company is today worth nearly $4 Billion.

Today we’ll hear from Glen about the series of quite fortunate events that led to Medidata’s formation, the challenges he faced in breaking into a traditional conservative space, and the opportunities he sees at the intersection of precision medicine, digital health, and value based care. Listeners interested in learning more about Glen’s story are encouraged to listen to Glen on Janelle Anderson’s always-insightful Human Proof of Concept podcast.

This episode of Tech Tonics is sponsored by DNAnexus, the secure and compliant cloud platform that enables enterprise users to analyze, collaborate around, and integrate massive amounts of genetic and other health data.

Tech Tonics: iRhythm’s Uday Kumar… What Makes Him Tick May 08, 2017

The medical device company iRhythm has been described as that rarest of all breeds – a digital health company with an actual, viable business model behind it. On today’s Tech Tonics podcast, we’re delighted to welcome Uday Kumar, the cardiologist and serial entrepreneur who started the company in his apartment, and learn what makes him tick (hopefully in normal sinus rhythm).

Raised in Rhode Island, the son of two physicians, Uday initially pursued biochemistry at Harvard, but soon found himself drawn to medical devices. After medical school and residency on the east coast, Uday guided himself to Silicon Valley, where he thought the environment would help maximize his chances for success as a medical device entrepreneur.

Apparently, he was right. Uday not only founded iRhythm, a company that reimagined real-world cardiac monitoring by replacing a large backpack attached to leads and wires with a bandaid-size adhesive device, but he later also founded and now leads Element Science, a company tackling the challenge of sudden cardiac death in the days after a patient survives a heart attack.

This episode of Tech Tonics is sponsored by DNAnexus, the secure and compliant cloud platform that enables enterprise users to analyze, collaborate around, and integrate massive amounts of genetic and other health data.

Tech Tonics: Data Scientist Eric Perakslis, “I Build Stuff.” Apr 24, 2017

“I build stuff” is how data scientist Eric Perakslis modestly describes his breathless career, a journey that’s taken him from industry to academia and back again, with a brief stop at the FDA.

Eric’s first job after college was at a small combinatorial chemistry startup in Boston, but he was soon recruited to J&J, where he spent more than a decade, embracing roles of increased responsibility that focused on the management of distributed information. While there, he set up tranSMART, a pioneering open source clinical data warehouse for deidentified genetic and phenotypic data.

Eric then joined the FDA, and in a short but productive year and a half there, developed a high quality technology strategic plan for the organization, advanced their cybersecurity posture, helped them begin to move towards the cloud, and worked on the implementation of Safety and Innovation Act (FDASIA), completing over twenty FDASIA-related IT projects in just a few months.

The next stop for Eric was Harvard, where he joined (future Tech Tonics guest) Zak Kohane and helped establish the Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI). In his spare time, he also helped implement the data sharing platform supporting the Undiagnosed Disease Network. (Note: Tech Tonics co-host David is an adjunct/Visiting Scientist at the DBMI.)

More recently, Eric was recruited back to industry, motivated by the prospect of working with the exceptional science team Takeda has brought together (including several of David’s former colleagues from Merck). Eric is currently SVP and Head of Takeda Data Sciences Institute, and is focused on creating a unified data science platform for the organization.

Eric has achieved much of this while combating a diagnoses of primary renal cell cancer, which was first identified while he was at J&J, and which recently recurred, but again responded to a treatment approach Eric describes as “whack-a-mole.” According to Eric, his diagnosis “doesn’t dominate every aspect of my life – I view it as a chronic illness, and there are a lot worse things. I feel grateful, and I appreciate the cancer has given me a greater connection to what I do.”

This episode of Tech Tonics is sponsored by DNAnexus, the secure and compliant cloud platform that enables enterprise users to analyze, collaborate around, and integrate massive amounts of genetic and other health data.

Tech Tonics: Jan Bruce and the Science of Resilience Apr 10, 2017

When you ask Jan Bruce where she grew up, she says “in the media business.” Jan worked early on in the magazine and then digital media sectors, backing into the health and wellness category through opportunity. She planned a career as editor and publisher but always found herself gravitating to selling the advertising rather than focused on editorial.

It turns out Jan was a born entrepreneur and that is now where she again finds herself as CEO of MeQuilibrium, after years in media (including a stint with Martha Stewart Omnimedia), and a lifetime practice of personal well-being. Watching her media colleagues tout health but ignore their own well-being, Jan saw a gap in the market distinct from what most think of as wellness. Thus she set out to help the nation’s largest companies build “transformational human and organizational resilience” by applying the right combination of technology, and psychology. Her goal is nothing less than to address what she describes as a rapidly altering value exchange between employer and employee.

We are grateful to our sponsor, AARP Market Innovation for supporting this episode of Tech Tonics. AARP Market Innovation, which works to spark innovation in the market that will benefit the quality of life for people over 50.

Tech Tonics: Jess Mega of Verily Actually Is Making the World a Better Place Mar 27, 2017

Jessica Mega, an accomplished cardiologist and now Chief Medical Officer at Alphabet’s Verily (formerly Google Life Sciences), says she joined the venerable Silicon Valley company to help patients. According to Jess, physicians who love patients need to lean into the tech world because great tech that doesn’t actually change care doesn’t have much of a chance, implying also that it doesn’t have much of a point.

Very early to the concept of what is now called Precision Medicine, Jess helped pioneer the idea of large scale patient data collection (e.g., a study with multiple countries, 1000 sites, 20,000 patients) while studying the individual effects of medications, such as Plavix among populations. She was early to the concept of joining genetic, clinical and phenotypic information together to inform medicine, a concept she has imported to Verily as they take on some of the most challenging clinical problems together with world class medical partners such as Novartis, Dexcom, J&J and the American Heart Association, among others.

Jess imbues her work with the enthusiasm of someone who feels that work is play and that a real contribution is possible every day. She brings the kind of empathy and humanity to Silicon Valley that makes the effective intersection of tech and healthcare seem not just desirable, but also achievable. She just may be making the world a better place.

Tech Tonics: Deborah Kilpatrick – Calling Audibles Mar 06, 2017

Deborah Kilpatrick grew up on a family farm in rural Georgia; her dad was a teacher and football coach; she describes life in her town as “very Friday Night Lights.”

With a passion for math and science, Deb decided to becoming a Ramblin’ Wreck at Georgia Tech, continuing on there for a masters and PhD in mechanical engineering after spending a few post-college years working in the aerospace industry building military aircraft engines. She reports that the memory of walking through the hangar past the entirely male team came flooding back when she recently watched the film Hidden Figures.

Eventually, Deb found her way to Silicon Valley, where she helped grow a medical device company (Guidant), and a molecular diagnostics company (CardioDx) before assuming her current and most ambitious role as CEO of Evidation Health, a company focused on defining and demonstrating outcomes in digital health. But as an entrepreneur, Deb draws a straight line between her childhood experience watching her dad build a football program in rural Georgia and her own willingness to start all over again every Monday and play any game and do everything you can do and then do it all over again, while building teams of people from disparate backgrounds to maximize their strengths and point them towards common goals. Rumor has it that it’s tough to work for Deb if you don’t know what “calling an audible” means.

We are delighted to welcome Deborah Kilpatrick, a helluva engineer, to Tech Tonics.

This episode of Tech Tonics is sponsored by DNAnexus, the secure and compliant cloud platform that enables enterprise users to analyze, collaborate around, and integrate massive amounts of genetic and other health data.

Tech Tonics: The Intersection of Medicine and Marijuana Feb 20, 2017

Reports suggest that today there are between 1.2 to 2.6 million legal medical marijuana users in the U.S. But as we know, there is great controversy about medical marijuana as a “legitimate” medical intervention due to its history as an illegal substance and the lack of a large body of clinical trial evidence.

And yet, according to Pamela Hadfield, co-founder of HelloMD, cannabis is actually one of the single biggest healthcare disruptors out there today. It is not only becoming increasingly serious business, but it is being taken seriously as a viable form of medicine in many quarters, even it though it remains somewhat marginalized in some quarters.

Pamela Hadfield has, by many measures, had a traditional path through the tech world. She has been a successful pioneer in 3D animation, virtual reality and user experience all the way back to the early 1990’s. She and her HelloMD co-founder, husband Mark Hadfield, have been part of numerous tech successes and started this company as a continuation of that effort, this time in the telemedicine area. But along the way, they realized the real opportunity was not telemedicine per se, but the legitimization of medical marijuana and the ability to serve patients who had found no other solutions to their medical challenges. A controversial topic to be sure, but one we are not afraid to tackle here on Tech Tonics!

In this episode, Pamela talks about how the cannabis industry is changing medicine and, interestingly, how working in this field can affect friendships and acceptance in the entrepreneurial community, not to mention what you tell your children at the dinner table.

We’re grateful to our sponsor, AARP Market Innovation, for supporting this episode of Tech Tonics. AARP Market Innovation, which works to spark innovation in the market that will benefit the quality of life for people over 50.

Tech Tonics: Chris Benko, From Fortune 100 to Fortune Seeker Feb 06, 2017

Chris Benko first joined Merck when he was but a lad of eighteen, rising through the ranks in HR and talent management to become one of the youngest VPs in the history of the organization, at the age of 34.

But instead of continuing his ascending career into the senior ranks of biopharma, Chris opted instead to scratch the entrepreneurial itch and, after several years in Merck venture capital group, he founded a new company and left Merck to run it.

Benko’s startup, Koneksa Health, focuses on applying the tools of digital health to the challenges of early clinical drug development. The goal is to support better internal decisions, particularly about which might be the most promising drug candidates, through the application of real world patient data obtained in the setting of a pharmaceutical clinical study. The company is one of several that is leveraging the ever-expanding world of data to improve operations, efficacy and efficiency within the healthcare landscape.

We are delighted to welcome Chris to Tech Tonics. Join us as we discuss his path from the Fortune 100 to fortune-seeker at an enterprise of his own making.

This episode of Tech Tonics is sponsored by DNAnexus, the secure and compliant cloud platform that enables enterprise users to analyze, collaborate around, and integrate massive amounts of genetic and other health data.

Tech Tonics: Susannah Fox, Learning from MacGyver Patients Jan 16, 2017

Susannah Fox eloquently described her job as U.S. HHS Chief Technology Officer – a role which just came to an end in the transition to a new administration – as “helping Health and Human Service (HHS) leadership harness the power of data, technology, and innovation to improve the health and welfare of the nation.”

It sounds like a tall order, but Fox was uniquely suited to take it on given her previous experience at the Pew Research Center and as Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Yet her most relevant experience may well have been her training in anthropology; Fox views technology as “a Trojan Horse for culture change,” as MobiHealthNews reporter Jonah Comstock nicely summarized.

She refers to herself as an “internet geologist” rather than a policy person.
Fox has also recognized the importance of field discovery, the innovative contribution of folks on the front lines of healthcare — as MIT professor Eric von Hippel has championed, as well as UCSF’s Aenor Sawyer (see this 2016 TechTonics podcast). She has strongly emphasized the role of patients as partners in discovery, eschewing the idea they should be passive subjects in their healthcare experience (David, in particular, has long been especially passionate about this topic – see here).

Fox’s legendary empathy and commitment – to patients, to innovation, to collaborators – contributed to her exceptional impact in her role as HHS CTO, and we’re so privileged to have her on our program (which was recorded shortly before she left office). Join us as we discuss Susannah’s life and work to make a meaningful difference in the healthcare lives of everyday people.

This episode of Tech Tonics was sponsored by DNAnexus (dnanexus.com), the secure and compliant cloud platform that enables enterprise users to analyze, collaborate around, and integrate massive amounts of genetic and other health data.

Tech Tonics: Sridhar Iyengar on IoT Meets Life Science Research Jan 02, 2017

Many entrepreneurs and investors on our podcast advise would-be innovators to focus on the problem to be solved, rather than become wrapped up in a particular technology. “Your solution,” VC Dave McClure famously warned entrepreneurs, “Is not my problem.”

On the other hand, many scientists – and students of science – have emphasized the pivotal role of new technology in driving progress. For instance, legendary biologist Sydney Brenner once described scientific progress as “the interplay of techniques, discoveries, and new ideas – probably in that order.”

Today’s guest, serial entrepreneur Sridhar Iyengar is an example of the second type of innovator, one who is captivated by a particular technology and determined to find a use for it. His passion for signal processing algorithms was a key factor in the success of his first major company, AgaMatrix and also a pivotal driver of his second major company, Misfit Wearables. He’s now started a new, exciting company, Elemental Machines, which he might pitch as “internet of things meets life science research.”

Join us as we discuss Sri’s entrepreneurial journey from Knoxville, Tennessee to Silicon Valley and Cambridge, MA; learn how he first met his long-time collaborator Sonny Vu; and hear how John Sculley (of Apple and Pepsi fame) played a pivotal role in his digital health career.

This episode of Tech Tonics is sponsored by DNAnexus, the secure and compliant cloud platform that enables enterprise users to analyze, collaborate around, and integrate massive amounts of genetic and other health data.

Tech Tonics: Rasu Shrestha – Living Inside the Culture Clash Dec 12, 2016

Rasu Shrestha, MD, is one of those doctors who found his way from medicine to technology. As he puts it, he rolled downhill from his birthplace in Kathmandu, Nepal, across many continents and into medical school in India. But Rasu kept rolling, finding his way to London, Los Angeles and then Pittsburgh where he now serves as Chief Innovation Officer at UPMC, one of the nation’s largest integrated delivery systems.

According to Rasu a culture clash is playing out in healthcare, specifically a clash between physicians and innovators and the tension between what is known and what is new. Doctors are taught to “go with the evidence-based – the tried, the true the tested.” On the other hand, innovators are taught to do something totally new outside the realm of what is known. The two need to come together. Rasu is calling for a shift in mindset from doing digital to being digital and for a coming together of physicians and innovators towards mutual goals that incorporate design thinking, end user engagement and new ways of understanding each other’s perspectives. Rasu acknowledges that this shift is essential given the role that UPMC plays in defining digital health success stories as both purchaser and one of the nation’s most prolific funders of digital health products and services.

And like many physician-innovators we have interviewed at Tech Tonics, Rasu has a creative side that extends beyond the medical. He is a prolific painter and likes to express himself as much through canvas as code.

We are grateful to AARP for sponsoring this episode of TechTonics. AARP’s Market Innovation team works to spark innovation in the market that will benefit the quality of life for people over the age of 50.

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected