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

Show notes

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

Show notes

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

Show notes

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

Show notes

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

Show notes

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

Show notes

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

Show notes

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

Show notes

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.

Rockpointe: innovators in medical education and patient engagement. — Tech Tonics: Allison Kurian, Bringing Curiosity and Compassion To Breast Cancer Genetics Feb 18, 2019
Show notes

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

Show notes

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.

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