Tag: David Shaywitz

Want to Revolutionize Healthcare? Enable Physicians, Don’t Replace Them

Jun 27, 2012• 13

By David Shaywitz, MD

The reality of today’s funding environment for digital health entrepreneurs is that it’s traditional tech investors who have the lion’s share of the money, while most long-time healthcare investors are on the ropes, contending with fleeing LPs and at least the perception of disappointing returns.

While it’s great news that some tech funds seem interested in dipping their toes into the healthcare space, it’s concerning that the investors with the most resources are not necessarily the ones who understand healthcare the best.

Tech investors, in general, are not always comfortable with physicians, and seem much more at home with engineers and developers. These investors also tend to gravitate to businesses selling directly to consumers rather than dealing with the sordid complexities of our current healthcare system.

Many tech investors are also — understandably — drawn to the power of data, and the possibility of analytics, a sensible affinity but one that at times can translate into an excessively reductive view of medicine that fails to capture the maddening but very real ambiguity of medical science, and especially of clinical practice.

What The Emergence of an EMR Giant Means For the Future of Healthcare Innovation

Jun 11, 2012• 12

By David Shaywitz, MD

(Note: the following commentary was co-authored with Tory Wolff, a founding partner of Recon Strategy, a healthcare strategy consulting firm in Boston; Tory and I gratefully acknowledge the insightful feedback provided by Jay Chyung of Recon Strategy.)

Medicine has been notoriously slow to embrace the electronic medical record (EMR), but, spurred by tax incentives and the prospect of cost and outcomes accountability, the use of electronic medical records (EMRs) is finally catching on.

There are a large number of EMR vendors, who offer systems that are either the traditional client server model (where the medical center hosts the system) or a product which can be delivered via Software as a Service (SaaS) architecture, similar to what salesforce.com did for customer relationship management (CRM).

Historically, the lack of extensive standards have allowed hospital idiosyncrasies to be hard-coded into systems. Any one company’s EMR system isn’t particularly compatible with the EMR system from another company, resulting in – or, more fairly, perpetuating – the Tower of Babel that effectively exists as medical practices often lack the ability to share basic information easily with one another.

There’s widespread recognition that information exchange must improve – the challenge is how to get there.

One much-discussed approach are health information exchanges (HIE’s), defined by the Department of Health and Human Services as “Efforts to rapidly build capacity for exchanging health information across the health care system both within and across states.”

With some public funding and local contributions, public HIE’s can point to some successes (the Indiana Health Information Exchange, IHIE, is a leading example, as described here). The Direct Project – a national effort to coordinate health information exchange spearheaded by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT – also seems to be making progress. But the public HIEs are a long way from providing robust, rich and sustainable data exchange.

Seriously: Is Digital Health The Answer To Tech Bubble Angst?

Jun 8, 2012• 3

By David Shaywitz

As an ever increasing amount of money seems determined to chase an ever greater number of questionable ideas, it’s perhaps not surprising that inquiring minds want to know: (1) Are we really in a tech bubble? (2) If so, when will it pop? (3) What should I do in the meantime?

I’m not sure about Question 1: I’ve heard some distinguished valley wags insist we’re not in a tech bubble, and that current valuations are justified, but I also know many technology journalists feel certain the end is neigh, and view the bubble as an established fact of life – see here and here. The surge of newly-minted MBAs streaming to start-ups has been called out as a likely warning sign of the upcoming apocalypse as well.

I have the humility to avoid Question 2: as Gregory Zuckerman reviews in The Greatest Trade Ever, even if you’re convinced you’re in a bubble, and you’re right, the real challenge is figuring out when to get out. Isaac Newton discovered this the hard way in the South Sea Bubble, leading him to declare, “I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people.”

I do have a thought about Question 3, however – what to do: reconsider digital health — serious digital health.

Here’s why: Instagram and similar apps are delightful, but hardly essential; most imitators and start-ups inspired by their success are neither. It doesn’t strain credulity to imagine investors in these sorts of companies waking up one day and experiencing their own Seinfeld moment, as it occurs to them they’ve created a portfolio built around nothing.

Pills Still Matter

May 15, 2012• 5

By David Shaywitz, MD

Reviewing “The Myth of The Paperless Office” for the New Yorker in 2002, Malcolm Gladwell argued that if the computer had come first, and paper didn’t exist, someone would have had to invent it. Paper, it turns out, is a lot more useful than we typically appreciate.

It occurred to me that perhaps the same might be said of another product we seem to take for granted in the digital age – medicines. (Disclosure: I work at a company that makes them.)

Medicines – you know, those little white pills that everyone loves to critique – are in many cases remarkably effective solutions to very difficult problems; it’s actually kind of amazing how useful some of these products can be. What an incredibly powerful idea – addressing a difficult and complex health problem with a simple pill you can pop before breakfast.

I read a tweet recently asserting that physicians may soon prescribe health apps as an alternative to medications; my initial reaction: good luck with that one. It’s certainly easy enough to envision how magical thinking about the power of health apps will soon be replaced by disappointment as app developers realize something drug makers have known for years: it’s hard to improve health, and it can be very difficult to get patients to stick with a treatment long enough to make a difference.

Why the Fragility of Health Outcomes Research May Be a Good Outcome for Health

Apr 5, 2012• 1

By David Shaywitz, MD

Durably improving health is really, really hard.

I’ve discussed this in the context of drug discovery, which must contend with the ever-more-apparent reality that biology is incredibly complex, and science remarkably fragile. I’ve discussed this in the context of patient behavior, focusing on the need to address what Sarah Cairns-Smith and I have termed the “behavior gap.”

Here, I’d like to focus on a third challenge: measuring and improving the quality of patient care.

I’ve previously highlighted the challenges faced by Peter Pronovost of Johns Hopkins in getting physicians to adhere to basic checklists, or to regularly do something as simple and as useful as washing hands, topics that have been discussed extensively and in a compelling fashion by Atul Gawande and others.

Several recent reports further highlight just how difficult it can be not only to improve quality but also to measure it.

Consider the recent JAMA article (abstract only) by Lindenauer et al. analyzing why the mortality rate of pneumonia seems to have dropped so dramatically from 2003-2009. Originally, this had been attributed to a combination of quality initiatives (including a focus on processes of care) and clinical advances. The new research, however, suggests a much more prosaic explanation: a change in the way hospitals assign diagnostic codes to patients; thus, while rates for hospitalization due to a primary diagnosis of pneumonia decreased by 27%, the rates for hospitalization for sepsis with a secondary diagnosis of pneumonia increased by 178%, as Sarrazin and Rosenthal highlight in an accompanying editorial (public access not available).

Do Something Really Innovative In Health: Crowdsource Problems, Not (Just) Solutions

Feb 4, 2012

By David Shaywitz

Businesses exist to solve problems, right? Certainly, this is the heart of the classic entrepreneurial model: you become obsessed with a particular problem, and create a business to solve it. Example: eBay was created by Pierre Omidyar to solve a perceived problem with inefficient markets, and since its inception has generally focused on doing exactly this.

Most enterprises are not blessed by such a coherent focus, at least not for long. More often, organizations – including university research labs as well as for-profit businesses – have a point at which they realize that their challenge has changed, and the problem they thought there were going to solve has shifted or even completely disappeared. The team – often an impressive group of people representing a wide range of capabilities — is then left to figure out what to do.

While disbanding is always an option, it rarely seems to happen, at least volitionally. Businesses, projects, academic enterprises – all are obsessed with their own survival, which rapidly becomes the defining mission. As a result, the organization urgently tries to figure out a way to pivot, a way to apply established resources in a different, useful way as it searches for a purpose to justify its existence. Very often, the question becomes: what should we do – what problem should we solve?

Why Getting to a Digital Health Care System Is Going to Be Harder Than We Thought Ten Years Ago

Jan 1, 2012• 1

By David Shaywitz, MD and Tory Wolff

A leading scientist once claimed that, with the relevant data and a large enough computer, he could “compute the organism” – meaning completely describe its anatomy, physiology, and behavior. Another legendary researcher asserted that, following capture of the relevant data, “we will know what it is to be human.” The breathless excitement of Sydney Brenner and Walter Gilbert —voiced more than a decade ago and captured by the skeptical Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin [1]– was sparked by the sequencing of the human genome. Its echoes can be heard in the bold promises made for digital health today.

The human genome project, while an extraordinary technological accomplishment, has not translated easily into improved medicine nor unleashed a torrent of new cures. Perhaps the most successful “genomics” company, Millennium Pharmaceuticals, achieved lasting success not by virtue of the molecular cures they organically discovered, but by the more traditional pipeline they shrewdly acquired (notably via the purchase of LeukoSite, which ultimately yielded Campath and Velcade).

The enduring lesson of the genomics frenzy was succinctly captured by Brown and Goldstein, when they observed, “a gene sequence is not a drug.”

Flash forward to today: technologists, investors, providers, and policy makers all exalt the potential of digital health [2]. Like genomics, the big idea – or leap of faith — is that through the more complete collection and analysis of data, we’ll be able to essentially “compute” healthcare – to the point, some envision, where computers will become the care providers, and doctors will at best be customer service personnel, like the attendants at PepBoys, interfacing with libraries of software driven algorithms.

A measure of humility is in order. Just as a gene sequence is not a drug, information is not a cure. Getting there will take patience, persistence, money and aligned interests. The most successful innovators in digital health will see the promise of the technology, but also accept, embrace, and ideally leverage the ambiguity of disease, the variability of patients, and the complexities of clinical care.
Continue reading…

Balancing Consistency and Innovation in Healthcare

Sep 20, 2009• 20

By DAVID SHAYWITZ, MD, PhD

Our healthcare system is now facing a problem that has plagued business leaders for years: how do you balance consistency and innovation?

The drive for consistency in healthcare is based upon the fundamental observation that physicians across the country treat similar medical conditions in dramatically different fashions. Sometimes, these different approaches are costly, such as using a more expensive treatment when a less expensive approach might be as effective. In other cases, these practice variations are dangerous – failing to provide patients with treatment the evidence suggests is best.

Standardizing the delivery of care — identifying “best practices,” and then insisting physicians follow these guidelines – could, in theory, save money while improving quality, and is the basis of Obama’s healthcare proposal.Continue reading…

The Right to Live

Sep 2, 2009• 14

By DAVID A. SHAYWITZ

After generations in denial, doctors and lawmakers are paying attention to
the importance of allowing sick people a dignified death, and to the value of
helping patients and their families let go and say good-bye. Aggressive medical
intervention in terminal cases is increasingly considered an avoidable cruelty,
inflicted on a suffering patient by someone — occasionally a doctor, but more
often a family member — unable to acknowledge the inevitable.

As an intern, I see this almost every day, and I’m grateful that most
physicians now go out of their way to emphasize to patients and their families
the limitations of medical technology. Medical students attend lectures on
caring for dying patients, and medical journals remind doctors of the importance
of letting patients die with respect and, as far as possible, without pain.

But as an experience in my own family made clear, this newfound concern for a
good death can be taken too far during a patient’s final days.