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Ryan Bose-Roy

Art Is in the Eye of the Computer

BY KIM BELLARD

It turns out that I’ve been writing about Generative AI without even realizing there was something called Generative AI, such as articles about the robot artist Ai-Da, the AI image creator DALL-E, or patent protection for AI inventors.  Generative AI refers to AI that strives not just to process and synthesize data but to actually be creative.  It’s starting to both become more widespread and to attract serious attention from investors.  

James Currier of investment firm NFX sees “Generative Tech” as the next big thing: “If crypto hadn’t happened, we’d probably be calling THIS Web3.”  He distinguishes Generative AI from Generative Tech as: 

Some have called it “Generative AI,” but AI is only half of the equation. AI models are the enabling base layers of the stack. The top layers will be thousands of applications. Generative Tech is about what will actually touch us – what you can do with AI as a partner.

He predicts Generative Tech will generate “trillions of dollars of value.”  I’m hoping that healthcare is paying attention.

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Sticks and Stones…

BY KIM BELLARD

According to the old saying, sticks and stones may break your bones, but names can never hurt you.  I’m not sure that still applies in a social media environment that can have real impacts on mental health of both teenagers and adults, but I have to note that healthcare seems to be pretty sensitive about who calls whom what.  

I’ll start with a new study from The Mayo Clinic about whether patients addressed their physicians by their first name.  It’s a tricky thing to get a gauge on; one could do surveys of both populations, or implant observers in exam rooms, but these researchers had the clever idea of examining how patients addressed their physician when using portal messaging.  They looked at over 90,000 messages from nearly 15,000 patients, with about 30,000 messages from 15,000 patients including a physician’s name (first or last).

The researchers don’t seem to have provided an overall percent of patients using the doctors’ first name, but they did report:

  • Female doctors were twice as likely as male doctors to be called by their first name;
  • DOs were similarly almost twice as likely as MDs to have their first name used;
  • Primary care doctors were 50% more likely than specialists;
  • Female patients were 40% less likely to use first names when addressing their physician.
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NEW Today! Health System Patient Comms Startup Well Health Becomes Artera

BY JESSICA DaMASSA

Gotta love a new name! Well Health, arguably one of the best-funded digital front door and patient communications startups you’ve never heard of (they’ve raised just under $100 million with little to no fanfare) is today announcing their new moniker, Artera.

Founder & CEO Guillaume de Zwirek breaks the news with us and talks about the strategy behind the name change from both a brand and a business standpoint. Artera is in the (still) hot health tech infrastructure space, selling a platform that health systems can easily integrate into their EMR systems, patient portals or other practice management software to easily send text messages, emails, or other communications to patients.

We get into the details about Artera’s business model, 500+ provider org client base (and what Gui is hearing about their current business challenges) and find our way into a big discussion about digital health funding, that whole bubble thing, health tech startup layoffs, and where Gui thinks the market is headed next. Bottom line: Some interesting comments here (starting around 18.30 mark) about how this might actually help healthcare in the long run.

A Country Doctor Reads: What if Burnout Is Less About Work and More About Isolation? (NYT)

BY HANS DUVEFELT

This weekend I read a piece in The New York Times that put a slightly different slant on what burnout, in the case of physician burnout, is or is caused by. We have heard theories from being asked to do the wrong thing, like data entry, to “moral injury” to my favorite, “burnout skills“, when you keep trying to do the impossible because people praise you when you pull it off.

Tish Harrison Warren’s piece is a dialog between her and psychiatrist/author Curt Thompson. He focuses on isolation as a driver of burnout:

Assume that if you’re burned out, your brain needs the help of another brain. Your brain is not going to be OK until or unless you have the experience and opportunity of being in the presence of someone else who can begin to ask you the kind of questions that will allow you to name the things that you’re experiencing.

The moment that you start to tell your story vulnerably to someone else, and that person meets you with empathy — without trying to fix your loneliness, without trying to fix your shame — your entire body will begin to change. Not all at once. But you feel distinctly different.

I’m not as lonely in that moment because you are with me. And I sense you sensing me. That’s a neural reality.

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The college football fans that beat COVID and the experts that couldn’t

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BY ANISH KOKA

The COVID pandemic was supposed to herald the end of the idea that a smaller government is a better government. The experts who desperately seek to be in charge of a sprawling bureaucratic state told us that it was only a powerful central authority that could do what was needed to safeguard individual liberties at a time when a highly contagious respiratory virus was spreading across the globe.

New Zealand may have imposed draconian policies that did not even allow its own citizens to return, but scenes of cheering unmasked New Zealanders stood in sharp contrast to empty seats in American stadiums when teams were allowed to play. If only US politicians possessed the iron will of New Zealand premier Jacinda Arden, Americans too could have ‘freedom’.

But in so many ways, the New Zealand example demonstrates the utter foolishness and shortsightedness of the central planners that seized control globally. A year after New Zealand took their victory lap COVID arrived in New Zealand and a very much masked Prime Minister noted that “very soon we will all know people who have Covid-19 or we will potentially get it ourselves”

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Better Living Through Better Design

BY KIM BELLARD

We’re almost two weeks past Hurricane Ian. Most of us weren’t in its path and so it just becomes another disaster that happened to other people, but to those people most impacted it is an ongoing challenge: over a hundred people dead, hundreds of thousands still without power, tens of thousands facing a housing crisis due to destroyed/damaged homes, and estimated $67b in damages.  It will take years of rebuilding to recover.  

In the wake of a natural disaster like a hurricane – or a tornado, a flood, even a pandemic – it’s easy to shrug our shoulders and say, well, it’s Mother Nature, what can we do?  There’s some truth to that, but the fact is there are choices — design choices — we can make to mitigate the impacts. A Florida community called Babcock Ranch helps illustrate that.

Babcock Ranch is located a few miles inland from Ft. Myers, which was devastated by Ian.  It bills itself as “America’s first solar-powered town,” with an impressive array of almost 700,000 solar panels. More than that, it was built with natural disasters in mind: all utilities are underground, it makes use of natural landscaping to help contain storm surges, streets are designed to divert floodwaters, making use of multiple retaining ponds. 

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About That Cancer Moonshot

BY KIM BELLARD

Joe Biden hates cancer.  He led the Cancer Moonshot in the Obama Administration, and, as President, he reignited it, vowing to cut death rates in half over the next 25 years.  Last month, on the 60th anniversary of President Kennedy’s historic call for an actual moonshot, he vowed “to end cancer as we know it. And even cure cancers once and for all.”

But, as several recent studies show, cancer is still surprising us.  

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Has “Disruption” Reached Its Sell-by Date? 

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BY JEFF GOLDSMITH

If you read the business press, as I do every day, It is impossible to escape the “disruption” meme. Clayton Christiansen’s 1997 Innovator’s Dilemma explored how established businesses are blindsided by lower cost competitors that undermine their core products, and eventually destroy their businesses. Classic examples were the displacement of film-based cameras by digital cameras and then cell phones, the destruction of retail shopping by Amazon and of video rental by streaming video services.

A Civic Religion

Perhaps because Christiansen’s analysis arrived at the peak of the first Internet boom, it generated a high level of anxiety in the corporate world. It did not seem to matter that Christiansen’s analysis was riddled with flaws, meticulously detailed in Harvard colleague Jill Lepore’s takedown in the New Yorker in 2014.

By then, the disruption thesis had become a cornerstone of a kind of civic religion, an article of faith and an indispensable staple of fundraising pitches in the venture and private equity worlds.   No one seemed to be asking how great a trade for the society was, say, tiny Craigslist taking down the newspaper business by drying up its classified ad revenues.   

Disrupting a $4 Trillion Health System

I believe that, twenty five years on, the notion of disruptive innovation has reached its “sell-by” date. At least in healthcare, the field of commerce I follow most closely, it is now doing more harm than good. The healthcare version of the disruption thesis was found in Christiansen’s “Innovator’s Prescription”, written with health industry maverick Dr. Jerome Grossman in 2009. Christiansen and Grossman forecast that innovations such as point-of-care testing, retail clinics, and special purpose surgical hospitals threatened to take down healthcare incumbents. 

A swarm of breathless (and reckless) healthcare disruption forecasts shortly followed. 

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The Digital Health Update from Europe: Startups, Funding, Frontiers Health & More

BY JESSICA DaMASSA

Roberto Ascione, CEO of European marketing and innovation consultancy, Healthware Group, and Chairman of Europe’s premier digital health conference, Frontiers Health, literally has a front-row seat to all the happenings in Europe’s scaling digital health, digital therapeutics, and telehealth markets.

With juuuust enough time for American investors and innovators to snag their own ticket for a seat at Frontiers Health in Milan on October 20-21, 2022, we check in with Roberto to see if European health tech startups are fairing any better than their US-based counterparts, if EU-based investors are just as flush with funding as they have been through the pandemic, and if enthusiasm is still high for virtual care and digital health among government healthcare organizations, their health systems, and their patients.

Europe is NOT the same market as the US, and Roberto details some notable differences in the state-of-play and top-of-mind issues facing health tech across the pond. Many of these topics will take center stage at Frontiers Health, including some important governance conversations around digital therapeutics. For the gossip on what’s happening in health tech in Europe, check out this interview and for more on what’s on the agenda at Frontiers (which can be attended virtually for those averse to Milan 😉) head on over to www.frontiers.health.

Truth and Trust in Science: Are They Negotiable?

BY MIKE MAGEE

“The key is trust. It is when people feel totally alienated and isolated that the society breaks down. Telling the truth is what held society together.”

Those words were voiced sixteen years ago in Washington, D.C. It was October 17, 2006. The HHS/CDC sponsored workshop that day was titled “Pandemic Influenza – Past, Present, Future: Communicating Today Based on the Lessons from the 1918-1919 Influenza Pandemic.”

The speaker responsible for the quote above was writer/historian and Johns Hopkins School of Public Health adviser, John M. Barry. His opening quote from George Bernard Shaw set a somewhat pessimistic (and as we would learn 14 years later, justified) tone for the day:

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