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

AMAZING! Health 2.0’s Precision Health Summit was an absolutely amazing event focused on the future of health, highlighting how technology and big data are transforming healthcare.

Health 2.0, the conference organizer, is a digital health media company, and in addition to its signature event in Santa Clara, has run conferences in Europe, Latin America, India, Japan and more.  The Technology for Precision Health Summit delivered.

I arrived at the summit, was greeted by Joan Hwang of their Marketing and PR team and obtained my badge.  I took the elevators to the 15^th floor and sat at tables with health professionals, researchers, venture capitalists and healthcare entrepreneurs.

The second session, Precision Medicine Pt. 2 – Underlying Technologies Enabling Precision Medicine and Precision Health, perked me up, where I learned that Redox is building an API for healthcare. Genius!

The New Diagnostic Screening Tools and Predictive Analytics – Oncology and Beyond panel was FANTASTIC!  For me, one of the highlights of the conference were the live demos by healthcare companies.

I was super impressed by Color, Helix and Kenzen. Here’s why.

Color offers affordable genetic testing to help understand your risk for common hereditary cancers & hereditary high cholesterol.  Pretty amazing if you think about it.

Helix, founded by a former VC, blew us away. Think of a app store for DNA testing. Using DNA, you can discover your ancestry, slumber habits and more. Welcome to the future: now.

Hands down, my personal favorite was Kenzen. Kenzen uses sweat analysis and continuous health monitoring to help you get ahead of injuries and avoidable health conditions.  Imagine a wearable that provides real time feedback, infinitely more powerful than FitBit or the Apple Watch. INCREDIBLE.

This conference is one of the best I’ve attended.  As a tech professional, I’ve attended many tech conferences.  The Technology for Precision Health Summit was focused, drove excellent conversations on the future of health, showcased healthcare startups leveraging technology as a differentiator and highlighted the importance of data collaboration in order to address today’s health challenges.

In my experience, a culture of collaboration both intra-company and industry wide, leads to greater outcomes for all.

This conference should be attended by every healthcare professional concerned about the future of health and every venture capitalist looking for new platforms to deploy capital.

This is the place to view demos, learn how startups are creating Health 2.0 and understand how to partner with these companies.

I highly recommend the Technology for Precision Health Summit and look forward to their next conference!

Image credit: Health 2.0

No matter your age healthcare is/should be a serious concern.

If not for yourself then for your parents and others you care about.

And not just a new app that delivers services a different way, no matter how good.

What needs to change is the culture of not only insurance companies, but medical service providers (doctors, labs, testing, hospitals, etc.), other various and sundry vendors within the ecosystem, not to mention the government in the form of Medicare and Medicaid.

When you look at the deeply entrenched interests on that list the possibility of anything actually happening in the near-term seems remote, if at all.

Not even the proverbial 500 pound gorilla, think Google or Facebook, has the clout to even dent that crowd.

But what about Aetna Insurance under CEO Mark Bertolini, a 1000 pound gorilla and long-time global player in healthcare that has the clout, since it insures two thirds of the Fortune 100 and a great number of the 500?

…Bertolini called the sector “too bloated and accountable to no one.” The system — which will cost US$4.6 trillion, or 20 percent of U.S. GDP, by 2020 — “charges patients and rewards care providers on services delivered, not patient outcomes,”…

Aetna is taking a three prong approach that includes, paying for positive outcomes, as opposed to fees for services; changing corporate health offerings in order to tap into positive consumer behavior and eating its own dog food — as every good startup does.

The big question is whether Aetna will walk its talk.

Based on the comments it’s questionable.

Flickr image credit: Aetna

Startup people are notorious for their long work hours.

They’re also known to play hard and not just in bars; most are into some form of working out or athletics and many are into extreme sports.

And most are knowledgeable enough to eat right and allow their bodies to recuperate.

But what about brains?

Brains work just as hard as bodies, if not harder and longer per 24 hour period.

It turns out that brains have their own janitorial system comparable to the body’s lymphatic system that cleans up metabolic toxins.

Maiken Nedergaard, a Danish biologist who has been leading research into sleep function at the University of Rochester’s medical school calls She called it the glymphatic system, a nod to its dependence on glial cells (the supportive cells in the brain that work largely to maintain homeostasis and protect neurons) and its function as a sort of parallel lymphatic system.

The bad news, from the viewpoint of most startup folks, is that it only works while sleeping.

“In a series of new studies on mice, her team discovered exactly that: When the mouse brain is sleeping or under anesthesia, it’s busy cleaning out the waste that accumulated while it was awake.”

But the truly bad news, the news that should make you think twice about ignoring these findings and charging ahead, is the long-term damage.

“The Journal of Neuroscience, the Veasey lab found that while our brains can recover quite readily from short-term sleep loss, chronic prolonged wakefulness and sleep disruption stresses the brain’s metabolism. The result is the degeneration of key neurons involved in alertness and proper cortical function and a buildup of proteins associated with aging and neural degeneration.”

It’s been proven over and over that a tired brain is neither productive nor innovative and now there’s early proof of potentially serious long-range damage from lack of sleep.

After all, what good does it do to improve physical health if your mind is rotting?

“Nationwide, entrepreneurs tend to eat more healthful foods and exercise more than other workers. But they also have more stress and are less likely to have health insurance.”

Worse, there is a chicken-and-egg connection between less sleep and neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

Not absolutely proven, but neither was the football connection between concussions and brain problems that is playing out in the courts today.

Editor’s note: Since the subject came up, what makes more sense to solve the problem of how a startup can offer health insurance than a startup with a founder who really understands?

Scott Gerber, founder of the Young Entrepreneur Council, which provides startup mentorship and resources and conducts research on entrepreneurs’ needs. To address this problem, his organization is introducing StartupInsurance, an online platform of health insurance plans offered by major health insurers, which will be compliant with the Affordable Care Act by 2014 and are tailored for entrepreneurs.

Flickr image credit: Adam Goode

Image credit:Brave New Films

Yet another article on Wal-Mart’s commitment to sustainability. Now, I’m not knocking what they’re doing, but I do wonder if Wal-Mart’s sustainability efforts will ever be extended to their workforce.

Of course, according to Northeast corporate affairs representative Steve Restivo it is, “”Another component, and the one, frankly, that I’m most proud of, is the Personal Sustainability Program for our associates.” At the Portsmouth store, employees are taking part in three programs — stopping smoking, losing weight and changing to CFL bulbs in their homes.”

It really is too bad that sustainability doesn’t extend to equality in the workplace, health insurance, full-time employment and decent wages, but maybe the shopping public won’t support that.

What do you think? Are Wal-Mart’s efforts ground-breaking or damage control?