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Tech Tonics — Health & Fitness
Tech Tonics

Tech Tonics, the Podcast, is a twice-monthly program focused on the people and passion at the intersection of technology and health. Hosted by Lisa Suennen and David Shaywitz (the co-authors of “Tech Tonics: Can Passionate Entrepreneurs Heal Healthcare With Technology?”) the show draws on their experience in business, medicine, and health-IT.

The Tech Tonics podcast seeks to bring the people in the digital health field to life and, ideally, elevate humanism in a healthcare world captivated by technology. “We deeply believe in what Robert Coles, an inspiration to us both, has termed ‘the call of stories,’” David Shaywitz says. “Our aspiration is to bring the spirit of Coles and Michael Lewis to the world of digital health.”

Together, Suennen and Shaywitz engage a range of intriguing guests in discussions that enable listeners to appreciate the stories behind the startups and the people behind the passion.

Lisa Suennen is the Managing Partner of Venture Valkyrie Consulting, LLC, a firm that provides advisory services to corporate and independent venture capital funds and to large and small companies around investment and product strategy, innovation spin-outs, market development, partnerships and financing. She is currently a member of the Qualcomm Life Advisory Board, the Sanofi Integrated Care Advisory Board, the Dignity Health Foundation Board, and an Advisor to the California Health Care Foundation Innovation Fund and a member of several private company Boards of Directors.

Dr. David Shaywitz is the Chief Medical Officer of DNAnexus, a company that makes it easier to work with genomic data using advanced bioinformatics and scalable compute systems based on the cloud. He received his M.D. from the Harvard-MIT Division of Health, Science, and Technology at Harvard Medical School, and his Ph.D. from the Department of Biology at MIT. He trained in internal medicine and endocrinology at the Massachusetts General Hospital, and conducted his post-doctoral research in Doug Melton’s lab at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute.

Tech Tonics, the Podcast is produced by Jason Lopez and syndicated by Connected Social Media. You can also find out more at venturevalkyrie.com and connectedsocialmedia.com.

Copyright: © ConnectedSocialMedia.com

Latest Episodes:

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

Show notes

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

Show notes

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

Show notes

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

Show notes

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

Show notes

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

Show notes

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

Show notes

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

Show notes

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

Show notes

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

Show notes

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

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