By DAVID SHAYWITZ, MD

“People hate pharma,” my Forbes colleague Matthew Herper observed recently–and at times I can understand why. There’s not much to admire about executives like Martin Shkreli, or businesses like Valeant.

But I’ve started to worry that the “pharma = evil” narrative has become so ingrained that it’s taking on a life of its own, as readers instinctively anticipate this storyline, and journalists reflexively provide it. Coverage of a recently announced innovative training collaboration between Johns Hopkins and MedImmune (a subsidiary of AstraZeneca ), for instance, focused primarily on potential conflicts of interest.

(Disclosure/reminder: I work at DNAnexus, a health data management company in Silicon Valley and Boston; our partners include universities, government agencies and private companies.)

This narrow view, however, not only fails to capture the urgent need for effective, new therapies, it overlooks entirely the vital role played by companies in translating fragile but promising scientific ideas into robust medicines for patients.

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By DAVID SHAYWITZ, MD

In just four years, it seems, data science has devolved from the “sexiest job of the 21^stcentury” to a community of “research parasites.”

The latest assessment is courtesy of an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), written by editor-in-chief Jeff Drazen, along with Dan Longo.

Essentially, Longo and Drazen argue that while the Platonic ideal of rich data sharing is lovely, reality is not so pretty.

First, Longo and Drazen allege, researchers who weren’t involved in gathering the original data often lack essential appreciation for how it was gathered, and thus may misinterpret it, as they “may not understand the choices made in defining the parameters.”

Second–and this is really the heart of the issue–Longo and Drazen worry that a new class of research person will emerge—people who had nothing to do with the design and execution of the study but use another group’s data for their own ends, possibly stealing from the research productivity planned by the data gatherers, or even use the data to try to disprove what the original investigators had posited. There is concern among some front-line researchers that the system will be taken over by what some researchers have characterized as “research parasites.”

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By DAVID SHAYWITZ, MD

Can an impassioned band of savvy, battle-tested techno-optimists save our healthcare system from its worst instincts, and deliver at least a soupcon of real interoperability?

That’s the question I found myself seriously contemplating after last week’s JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, and in particular after an inspiring data science roundtable discussion led by Aneesh Chopra (the first Chief Technology Officer of the United States, now at Hunch Analytics) and Claudia Williams, a senior advisor in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).

The FHIR Engine

The (not so) secret sauce in question is the FHIR (pronounced “fire”) interoperability standard that has emerged from the non-profit HL7 organization, and functions as a universal adaptor, allowing some types of clinically-relevant data types to be shared easily and securely. Remarkably, most major electronic health record (EHR) vendors – including athenahealth ATHN +0.00%, Cerner CERN +0.00%, and yes, Epic — have signed onto this concept, and agreed to support an early effort at implementation, known as the Argonaut Project.

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By DAVID SHAYWITZ, MD

The key to driving behavior change, a seasoned marketing executive turned digital health investor told a panel on patient engagement that I moderated this week, is to get beyond the demographics of customers, and to understand the “why” – what are their distinct motivations and drivers?

Customers with similar demographic characteristics might be motivated in very distinct ways, he explained; sophisticated, quantitative market research can help define the different “personalities” present in a particular market.

Healthcare businesses, he emphasized, need to recognize these differences, and customize their approaches based on this nuanced understanding.

On the one hand, it occurred to me he was describing the behavioral component of precision medicine; in the same way it’s important to match an oncology drug with the right biochemical pathway, it’s also essential to customize the motivational approach to the characteristics of each individual.

On the other hand, I realized there was something that seemed a little sad about the idea of developing extensive market analytics and fancy digital engagement tools to simulate what the best doctors have done for years – deeply know their patients and suggest treatments informed by this understanding.

Instead, it seems, we’ve slashed the time physicians get to spend with patients, protocolized and algorithmitized almost every moment of this brief encounter, and insisted the balance of time is used for point-and-click data entry and perhaps a rushed dictation.  We’ve industrialized the physician-doctor encounter – the process and the paperwork — but eviscerated the human relationship; it’s value, unable to translate easily to an excel spreadsheet, was discounted and dismissed.

As I look at the extensive analytic efforts to categorize patients, and the many digital health platforms designed to motivate behavior, it’s hard not to ask whether we’re painfully trying — at scale but without heart — to re-create something we might have been better off not destroying in the first place.

David Shaywitz is based in Mountain View, California. He is Chief Medical Officer at DNAnexus, a Mountain View based company and holds an adjunct appointment, Visiting Scientist, in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School.

By DAVID SHAYWITZ, MD

When Ben Horowitz was asked last November by Stanford Professor Tom Byers how the venture capital firm Andreessen-Horowitz (“a16z”) became so successful so quickly, and was able to crack open what had been an exclusive and self-perpetuating club of top VCs, Horowitz replied, “We were the first VC firm to super-aggressively market itself.”