I was 7 years old. My Mom was doing laundry, I tugged on her plaid shirt & when she turned around she saw tears in my eyes. I told her I wanted to do big things, that I wanted to make a difference somehow in my life. She hugged me & encouraged me to go for it like a great parent would. Dramatic? Definitely. But however that energy got there – it’s still there & the story of my career and life is one of trying to express that possibility.
I got my first job at 9 working a paper route. (I was the 2nd of 9 kids – if you wanted something you had to earn it!). At 16 I started in retail, eventually (after a bunch of years) leading a team of 150. I switched to consulting in healthcare when I saw the potential to make more difference than retail provided, but soon became disappointed in the traditional Fee For Service model of healthcare. I took a new role leading 10 primary care clinics & the incredible care providers who supported patients there. We made a valiant attempt to make Value Based Care happen, but we were too early. I saw then that without technology any impact was going to be small & I made my way to healthcare technology to deepen my understanding of tech and to help impact the improvement of healthcare using the leverage of software & data.
At the same time, especially now working around healthcare, I seemed surrounded by stories from people:
- Self-employed family members who were paying more than even the insurance companies did for the same exact services.
- Stories about doctors who didn’t seem to care about patients & patients that didn’t know the system doesn’t reward providers (often some of the most caring people on earth) the time to do so.
- Frustrated family members who couldn’t get answers about sicknesses no matter how many doctors & specialists they would visit & then eventually ending up in the “wild west” of wellness & alt medicine.
In conjunction with all this, I was going through an existential moment redefining the role of good-thinking & the potential of science for humanity here.
All of this was tinder for a match that would drop at a conference where an industry executive described a healthcare in the future that would be individualized, tech-enabled & prevent rather than just treat disease. It set my mind soaring & I realized that was big enough to spend the next 30+ years working on.
I read and re-read Eric Topol’s (a powerful thought leader for individualized medicine) books during a 300-book binge I’d been on and began to examine the healthcare industry from first principles to accelerate my efforts within the company.
Over the last few years some things have become clear:
- Prevention is going to be key to individualized medicine & the work on aging has the potential to prevent much more (& the cosmetics of it is far from the most important) than most expected years ago.
- The healthcare we need will not come from 1 vertical. Every part, if they choose to, has an important role to play: traditional healthcare, big tech, & grassroots consumers, but technology needs to play a critical role in each.
- The switch to value is necessary but insufficient but the time to move & learn is now or else organizations will be left behind when they can’t adapt.
Now the purpose of my writing here is to share & sharpen my thinking and to push the acceleration of that change, especially by encouraging the creation of builders & leaders. There is so much to do & so much opportunity that humans have the capability of solving. You can make a difference, help by building from wherever you are.