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

Show notes

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

Show notes

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

Show notes

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

Show notes

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

Show notes

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

Show notes

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

Show notes

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

Show notes

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

Show notes

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

Show notes

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.

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