Ducks in a Row: Old Folks Disrupting FOR Old Folks
by Miki Saxon
It’s so sad. At least it is if you believe Vinod Khosla, who claims that no one over 45 has new ideas, let alone disruptive ones.
That doesn’t bode well for a new his new healthcare venture.
Amazon is forming a joint venture in healthcare aimed at employees with J.P. Morgan and Berkshire Hathaway, according to a company press release.
Obviously, Khosla and his groupies forgot to tell 54 year-old Jeff Bezos that he is dead in terms of new ideas and that his co-founders, Jamie Dimon, 62 and Warren Buffett, 87, are even deader.
Not only are his co-founders old-to-ancient, one of his first hires was a geriatrician (in case you don’t know, that’s a doctor that specializes in the Medicare crowd)
Must be those dead brain cells at work, since the tech crowd, who are disrupting healthcare with bio hacks and drop-in clinics, know that speed and convenience are what’s needed.
What is it that old guys can see — and the under-40 just don’t get?
If Amazon is looking to disrupt the healthcare industry, why start with geriatrics -— a specialty that hardly seems cutting-edge? But what tech experts don’t know, and what Amazon has figured out, is that to provide high-quality health care for seniors, physicians must be innovative — and disruptive.
Cutting edge IDEO figured that out in 2016.
Just as writers must use their life experience to write with any kind of authenticity, you can’t expect innovations from people who have never experienced or noticed the problem.
When your body, and those in your social circle, work as they should 99% of the time you are unlikely to have a handle on the difficulty of managing multiple, chronic diseases, especially with severely limited resources — financial and human.
So let’s hear it for the old crowd, may they focus their efforts on the problems and challenges of which their younger brethren are barely aware.
Hat tip to Emily White for sending the article.
Image credit: Stuart Richards
