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Health Tech’s Magic Wand: The Anti-Social Bent of Modern Medicine

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BY MIKE MAGEE

In George Packer’s classic 2013 New Yorker article titled “Change the World: Silicon Valley transfers its slogans – and its money – to the realm of politics,” there is a passage worth a careful reread now a decade latter.

Packer shares an encounter with a 20-something techie critiquing his young colleagues who said, “Many see their social responsibility fulfilled by their businesses, not by social or political action. It’s remarkably convenient that they can achieve all their goals just by doing their start-up. They actually think that Facebook is going to be the panacea for many of the world’s problems. It isn’t cynicism—it’s arrogance and ignorance.”

Packer’s assessment at the time was “When financiers say that they’re doing God’s work by providing cheap credit, and oilmen claim to be patriots who are making the country energy-independent, no one takes them too seriously—it’s a given that their motivation is profit. But when technology entrepreneurs describe their lofty goals there’s no smirk or wink.”

Or, as others might say, “They believe their own bull shit.” Where many of us are currently focused on issues of values, fairness and justice, those in the shadows of Silicon Valley see the challenge to be inefficiency and incompetence, and the solution amenable to technologic engineering.

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Can AI Part The Red Sea?

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BY MIKE MAGEE

A few weeks ago New York Times columnist Tom Friedman wrote, “We Are Opening The Lid On Two Giant Pandoras Boxes.” He was referring to 1) artificial Intelligence (AI) which most agree has the potential to go horribly wrong unless carefully regulated, and 2) global warming leading to water mediated flooding, drought, and vast human and planetary destruction.

Friedman argues that we must accept the risk of pursuing one (rapid fire progress in AI) to potentially uncover a solution to the other. But positioning science as savior quite misses the point that it is human behavior (a combination of greed and willful ignorance), rather than lack of scientific acumen, that has placed our planet and her inhabitants at risk.

The short and long term effects of fossil fuels and carbonization of our environment were well understood before Al Gore took “An Inconvenient Truth” on the road in 2006. So were the confounding factors including population growth, urbanization, and surface water degradation. 

When I first published “Healthy Waters,” the global population was 6.5 billion with 49% urban, mostly situated on coastal plains. It is now 8 billion with 57% urban and slated to reach 8.5 billion by 2030 with 63% urban. 552 cities around the globe now contain populations exceeding 1 million citizens.

Under ideal circumstances, this urban migration could serve our human populations with jobs, clean air and water, transportation, housing and education, health care, safety and security. Without investment however, this could be a death trap. 

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Bluesky Ahead

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BY KIM BELLARD

I’ve been thinking about writing about Bluesky ever since I heard about the Jack Dorsey-backed Twitter alternative, and decided it is finally time, for two reasons. The first is that I’ve been seeing so many other people writing about it, so I’m getting FOMO.  The second is that I checked out Nostr, another Jack Dorsey-backed Twitter alternative, and there’s no way I’m trying to write about that (case in point: Jack’s Nostr username is: npub1sg6plzptd64u62a878hep2kev88swjh3tw00gjsfl8f237lmu63q0uf63m.  Seriously).

It’s not that I’ve come to hate Twitter, although Elon Musk is making it harder to like it, as it is that our general dissatisfaction with existing social media platforms makes it a good time to look at alternatives.  I’ve written about Mastodon and BeReal, for example, but Bluesky has some features that may make sense in the Web3 world that we may be moving into. 

And, of course, I’m looking for any lessons for healthcare.

Bluesky describes itself as a “social internet.”  It started as a Twitter project in December 2019, with the aim “to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media.”   At the time, the ostensible goal was that Twitter would be a client of the standard, but events happened, Jack Dorsey left Twitter, Elon Musk bought it, and Bluesky became an independent LLC.  It rolled out an invite-only, “private beta” for iOS (Apple) users in March 2023, followed by an Android version in mid-April (again, invite-only).  People can sign up to be on the waitlist.  There are supposedly over 40,000 current users, with some million people reportedly on the waitlist.

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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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Stop Talking About the Bubble and Start Telling Your Story

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BY MICHELLE SNYDER

Unless you have been off the grid for the past few months (which frankly sounds kind of nice right now), you know that the digital health market has changed dramatically.   While not surprising to those of us who have been through the boom-and-bust cycles of the past two decades, it nevertheless has been an awakening for many investors and entrepreneurs.  

As an entrepreneur, there are some things you cannot control – the macro-economic climate, supply chain disruptions and narcissist led wars halfway around the world.  But what is entirely within your control is how you tell your company’s story and your ability to make investors want to join you on the journey.  

As a longtime storyteller for several digital health companies and a current story listener (aka investor), I’ve been thinking about this topic a lot lately.  Though the word “storyteller” can have negative connotations for some people, I value and appreciate great storytellers who engage me right off the bat, get me excited about the “why” and clearly articulate why it’s in my best interest to invest in their company.

The art of storytelling has always been important, but in the current digital health funding environment, it is quickly becoming essential for success.  Are you telling your company’s story in the most effective way?  Read on to find out.

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Will Boeglin demos TimeDoc Health

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Will Boeglin is CEO of TimeDoc Health. It’s one of a new breed of companies supplying the capability for physician groups and health systems (including FQHCs) to deliver CCM (chronic care management) and RPM (remote patient monitoring). Both of those services are now reimbursed by Medicare, and some private plans, but rolling them out and tracking all that activity–not to mention accounting and billing for it–is non-trivial for practices. That is where TimeDoc comes in. Will started the company as part of a med-school project and just raised $48m to really get it going. He showed me how it worked, and gave an extensive and interesting demo–Matthew Holt

How About This Opportunity, Health Tech Investors? Promoting Contraception vs. Banning Abortion

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By MIKE MAGEE

Dr. Linda Rosenstock has an M.D. and M.P.H. from Johns Hopkins, and was a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar. She is currently Dean Emeritus and Professor of Health Policy and Management at UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health, but also spent years in government, and was on President Obama’s Advisory Group on Prevention, Health Promotion and Integrative and Public Health.

In the wake of the release of Justice Alito’s memo trashing Roe v. Wade, she was asked to comment about the status of abortion in America. Here is what she said:

“The broader the access to proven family planning methods, the lower the unintended pregnancy rate and the lower the abortion rate. We can’t underestimate the role of educating and empowering women – and men – about these issues.”

These are not simply the opinions or insights of a single health expert. They are backed up by the following facts:

  1. Since 1981, abortion rates in U.S. women, age 15 to 44, have declined by nearly two thirds from 29.3 per 1000 to 11.4 per 1000.

2. Approximately half of all pregnancies in the U.S. are unintended.  Of those unintended, approximately 40% of the women chose to terminate the pregnancy by abortion – either procedural or chemically induced.

3.  The decline in the number of abortions has coincided with increased access to long-acting reversible contraception, including IUD’s and contraceptive implants. These options are now safe, increasingly covered by insurers, and more accessible to at-risk populations.

4. The increasing inclusion of sex education in middle school and high school curricula has been accompanied by a decline in high school sexual activity by 17% between 2009 and 2019.

5. There were 629,898 abortions recorded by the CDC in 2019. For every 1000 live births that year, there were 195 other women who chose to terminate their pregnancies. Almost half of the 1st trimester abortions are now chemically induced through Plan B-type pills.

What is clear from these figures is that knowledge and access to contraception is the best way to decrease the number of abortions in America.

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BREAKING at ViVE: Jenny Schneider on Launch of New Biz, Homeward

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by JESSICA DAMASSA, WTF HEALTH

BREAKING! Livongo-famous Jenny Schneider stops by to talk to us first, on-site at ViVE in Miami, about the brand-new business she’s just launched today to “rearchitect” rural health and care. Called Homeward, the startup is coming out with a $20 million Series A backed by General Catalyst, and a novel model that will integrate virtual-and-in-person primary care and cardiology care for Medicare beneficiaries in rural markets. We get into the business model, care model, some shocking statistics about just how dire the market need is, AND all the gossip about the old friends she’s bringing into the business with her. PLUS: Bonus dishing on Glen Tullman’s new business Transcarent, and what connection Homeward might have to the SPAC that Jenny co-founded with Glen, Hemant Teneja and Steve Klasko of General Catalyst. Coming at you fast with this one!

Does Digital Health Technology Have a “Famous Trio” in the Making?

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By MIKE MAGEE

Yale historian, Frank M. Snowden wisely notes in his 2020 book, “Epidemics and Society”, that “We must avoid the pitfall of believing the driver of scientific knowledge is ever a single genius working alone.”

His insight came to mind this week as I was reviewing the January 11, 2020 Forbes article by Seth Joseph, health tech policy correspondent, titled “What Bubble? Digital Health Funding Year in Review 2021.”

By one measure of success – dollars invested – it’s been a banner year. According to Joseph, there was over $29 billion funded, and 729 digital health US-based startups in 2021. But according to Scott Barclay, Managing Director at Insight Partners, who is quoted generously in the Forbes piece, “digital health is still in its relative infancy.”

This level of churn, passion, and (some might say) financial frenzy is reminiscent of another moment in scientific history – the latter half of the 19th century. Over a few decades, “The Germ Theory” was fleshed out with unprecedented and remarkable human progress following in its wake.

The breakthroughs were not the result of 729 often-repetitive and unoriginal ideas, but rather the work of three successive innovators whose work built on each other, combining innovation, technology and health.

Snowden termed the three “The Famous Trio.”

The first was Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) a chemist with a sharp eye and mind. He had been hired to find a solution for wine and milk that was spoiling too fast. The tools he wielded were mostly observational, including a still primitive microscope. With it, Pasteur was able to identify putrefying microbes as causal but went two steps further. He noted that a heating process killed the microbes and halted the product putrefaction, and tied the microscopic organisms to specific human diseases. With this knowledge, he unveiled a commercial process of serial attenuation of disease-causing microbes that allowed safe inoculation of humans and acquired immunity.

The second of the trio was Robert Koch (1834-1910), a physician 20 years younger than Pasteur. While studying Anthrax at the University of Gottingen, he visualized the large causative bacteria, introduced it into a lab animal, and reproduced the disease. Going one step further, he described resistant spores of the bacteria, identified them in grazing fields, and proved that eating grass laden with spores could spread Anthrax between animals. His careful investigative approach led to the uncovering of the etiology of tuberculosis and to “Koch’s Postulates”, four steps still in place today, which when followed, constitute laboratory-based scientific proof of a theory. Beyond this, Koch was a technology innovator, teaming up with the Carl Zeiss optical company, whose lenses, in combination with specialized tissue stains and fixed culture mediums, allowed Koch to visualize and describe M. tuberculosis.

The third innovator was Joseph Lister (1827-1912), a professor of surgery at Edinburgh.  Thanks to the development of ether and nitrous oxide in the 1840s, pain management intra-operatively was under partial control. Improving techniques and tools helped control blood loss. But post-operative infection remained a persistent and deadly threat. Viewing the work of Pasteur and Koch, Lister recognized the possibility that contamination with microbes might be the cause. In carefully designed studies, employing hand scrubbing, sterilization of tools, and spraying the patient with carbolic acid, rates of post-operative sepsis declined. Other colleagues added sterile gowns, gloves, and masks, merging these added measures with Lister’s support.

 Arguably, the life-saving “Germ Theory” was the work product of complementary insights and serial incremental progress. It might then be reasonable to ask, of the $29 billion funded 729 digital health tech US-based startups in 2021, how many represent additive and progressive insights that might eventually lead to game-changing advances in the health of America?

Scott Barclay appears to be mining this same territory. In Forbes, he says, “The green shoots of the past 10 years are turning into new vibrant ecosystems that are growing, but young. We are early in what may turn out to be a two-decade epoch of super innovative ideas, strong founders with execution experience bringing change to a $4T sector of the economy that has been sclerotic and in many parts oligopolistic. The majority of the largest digital health companies in 2040 public markets have not yet been started.”

Does Digital Health Technology have a “Famous Trio” in the making to link infrastructure, AI diagnostics, and evidence-based health? Who are they, and how do they complement each other?

Mike Magee, MD is a Medical Historian and Health Economist, and author of  “CodeBlue: Inside the Medical Industrial Complex.“

After the Crash

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By JEFF GOLDSMITH

These are grim days for innovative healthcare companies.  The health tech and care innovation firms mature enough to make it to public markets have been eviscerated in the ongoing market correction. As of January 29, 2022, high fliers like One Medical (down 83% from peak), Oscar (down 83%), Bright Healthcare (down 85%), Teladoc (down 77% but still selling at 6X revenues!), and AmWell (down 90%) are the tip of a much larger melting iceberg.    The dozens of digital health unicorns (e.g. pre-public companies valued at more than $1 billion) and their less mythical brethren, into which investors poured more than $45 billion during 2020-2021, are sheltering in the comparative safety of VC/Private Equity balance sheets. They are protected from investor wrath until those firms’ limited partners force a revaluation of their portfolios based on the market value of their publicly traded comparables.   

Yet it is the next moves that these innovative firms and their equity holders make that will determine whether these firms realize their full transformative potential or fade into insignificance. The Gartner Group, which tracks the technology industry generally, popularized the notion of the Hype Cycle- a seemingly universal trajectory that tech innovations and the firms that produce them follow (see below).   

                                                    The Gartner Hype Cycle

Everyone seems to focus on the colorful first phase of this cycle- the inflating and deflating part- where an innovation rises on a wave of the adulatory press (and breathless futurist punditry), then crashes ignominiously into the Slough of Despond.  A classic example was the Apple iPhone’s ill-starred great uncle, the Apple Newton, which launched in 1993 and crashed shortly thereafter.

For founders and investors, as well as customers, however, it is the less visible succeeding phases that determine if the innovation survives and the firms that produce them become ubiquitous and indispensable parts of our lives.  The rising initial phase of Gartner’s Hype Cycle is driven by the question “Is it cool”?, mediated by hyperactive media and Internet buzz.    The inevitable crash, on the other hand, is almost always driven by the troublesome real-world question,  “Does the product actually work as advertised?” Analysts, writers, and, most importantly, customers press uncomfortable questions about not only functionality, but also reliability, affordability, stickiness, and “value for money”.

How do firms survive the crash and climb Gartner’s “Slope of Enlightenment”?  This is the unglamorous “pick and shovel” part.  If the sticky “product integrity” issues (does the product actually work?) are resolved, then a host of important questions challenge the firm, its founders, and owners, which answers the crucial question:  whether it is a real business:   

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