Today I’m pleased to welcome Muema Lombe, a new voice at MAPping Company Success. He’ll be sharing news from conferences and interviews with founders.
Health 2.0 runs some of the best conferences for anyone passionate about the future of healthcare and medicine. I just attended its Technology for Precision Health Summit which focuses on predictive health and predictive medicine.
Linda Molnar, Chair of the Technology for Precision Health Summit, set to the tone for the day, speaking of what we can do today to improve care for the future.
In 2005, the market cap of Illumina, now the major gene sequencing company, was only $250 million. There was a relatively negligible amount of venture capital investment in digital healthcare. Now, in 2017, the market cap of Illumina, I checked this morning, is approaching $32 billion. And 2017 was a record-breaking year for venture capital invested in digital healthcare. When you start past $4 billion…
I sat next to Carmen Perez, a Healthcare professional passionate about innovation. Other attendees included physicians, researchers, oncologists and venture capitalists.
Claudia Williams, CEO of Manifest MedEx gave the Keynote. Claudia served as Senior Advisor for Health Innovation and Technology in the Obama White House. Claudia’s goal is to create an open platform of data, a health information exchange for the 21st century that brings together plans, providers, hospitals to share data and make it accessible through open API platform.
When I was at the White House, I helped launch and lead the precision medicine initiative, which was an ambitious project to found the framing hand of the 21st century, bringing together data, genomics data, health record data, wearable data from a million or more Americans, making that accessible on an open platform and with the goal of revolutionizing the discovery of new therapies and treatment.
Following Claudia’s Keynote, the first panel focused on Precision Medicine Pt. I – How Science and Technology are Changing Patient Care in Oncology. We heard from Jonathan Hirsch, founder and president at Syapse, which is in the business of implementing precision medicine in oncology.
Also on the panel was Anna Barry, a molecular pathologist and the Scientific Director at the Personalized Medicine Program at Swedish, a large private hospital that’s very research focused. They have over 700 clinical trials.
We heard from Vineeta Agarwala, a Director of Product Management at Flatiron Health. Vineeta shared that she had the epiphany that if we don’t figure out how to annotate genomic data well, and annotate it well at scale, sequencing data will never make it into the clinic in a meaningful way.
At it’s core, one of Flatiron’s mission, we are an oncology focused health-tech company based in New York. We make both provider facing software, such as an EMR product that’s used by a significant fraction of the community of oncology practices all across the country as well as research product and data sets, that are gleaned, again, largely the wealth, the majority of cancer patients today, in American who happen to be seen at excellent community centers all across the country.
Trained as a Neuro-Oncologist, Andrew Norton, Chief Medical Officer at Koda Health was also on the panel. Koda is a healthcare data analytics company, which focusing on cancer.
Essentially our core innovation that led to the founding of the company was the idea that without deep clinical data, and without the ability to stratify patients into meaningful, clinically determined sub-groups, you really can’t compare patient treatment pathways and outcomes across centers and across geography.
So essentially what we do, is we go into electronic medical records. We pull out all of the clinically relevant data that oncologists have told us matter in making treatment decisions, we condense that information into a digital code and then we use it to track patient treatment paths and outcomes over time. And really the fundamental goal of all that work is to enable providers to perform under value-based care contracts.
During the panel, Hirsch brought up that we have to think about it as how we combine molecular and clinical data and use that insight to enable a provider to make a better care decision for the patient.
He also made a very clear distinction between personalized medicine and precision medicine.
“And just to amplify that, we sometimes thing that there’s been a shift and personalized medicine and precision medicine are actually the same thing, and we’re just using different language. I don’t think that that’s the case. I really do think that there are these two complementary concepts of precision medicine being a data-driven approach and personalized, hopefully incorporating precision, but really thinking about the holistic care of the patient, supportive care services, psychological counseling, nutrition, etc. So I do think there are these two separate concepts, we shouldn’t confuse them. And both of them are incredibly important.”
Agarwala highlighted key questions we should consider including,
Where is the data to help physicians help make a decision about whether or not a particular therapy will work?
Where is the data to generate our collective understanding of what mutations confer resistance to therapy?
And I think today, while in some parts of the country there are molecular tumor boards and studies and post-effective studies that are extraordinary in their depth and characterization of patient outcomes they are not pervasive.
Unfortunately, for every patient who was in a study like that there are typically about a hundred who are undergoing the same type of care somewhere that’s completely silent to the research community. In a way that’s passive exhaust in our healthcare system that no one can access to learn from.”
There’s much more that I’ll share with you next week.
Introducing Re:scam – an artificially intelligent email bot made to reply to scam emails. Re:scam wastes scammers time with a never-ending series of questions and anecdotes so that scammers have less time to pursue real people. (…) Instead of junking or deleting a scam email, you can now forward it to Re:scam who will continue the conversation indefinitely – or until the scammer stops replying.
Add me@rescam.org to your address book and make sticking it to spammers effortless.
A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read allIf the Shoe Fits posts here.
Entrepreneurs are great, although I have to admit that the entitled, connected, mostly white, bros of Silicon Valley aren’t among the ones I like and respect.
And no matter how large the investment, high the valuation or great the returns, coming up with a new way to find a date/restaurant/cheap ticket for whatever or share your life (in order to believe you have one) I don’t find particularly impressive.
But I love those who solve real problems, whether for enterprise, healthcare, agriculture, and, especially, for our poor, beleaguered planet.
Most of the products his company makes from used coffee grounds are industrial, but they do have a consumer product called Coffee Logs (sadly not available in the US — yet).
Each carbon neutral Coffee Log is made from the grounds of 25 cups of coffee and contains about 20% more energy than wood – meaning it burns hotter and for longer than wood.
Now Bio-bean has teamed with Shell to produce biofuel.
The startup collects used coffee grounds from cafes, restaurants and factories, and transports them to its recycling facility. There, the grounds are dried before coffee oil is extracted.
The coffee oil is then blended with other fuels to create B20 biofuel, which can be used in diesel buses without modification.
Without modification, that’s huge and undercuts the biggest reason governments use to avoid greener options — cost of conversion.
And that doesn’t even factor in the benefits from not sending all those coffee grounds to the landfill.
The UK produces 500,000 metric tons of coffee grounds each year, but that pales in comparison to what is left in the US after making 400 million cups of coffee every single day.
Kay needs to bring his concept to the US—it would make quite a difference.
Our apologies for missed and late postings. We were still having technical issues, but they’ve all been handled. (I hope!)
I’m ambivalent about AI.
On one hand, some of the things it can do, such as enable an iPhone to do an ultrasound scan, are amazing and encouraging.
Earlier this year, vascular surgeon John Martin was testing a pocket-sized ultrasound device developed by Butterfly Network, (…) he knew that the dark, three-centimeter mass he saw did not belong there. “I was enough of a doctor to know I was in trouble,” he says. It was squamous-cell cancer.
On the other hand, AI is full of human bias, whether intentional or not.
It’s amazing to me, but looking back over more than a decade of writing I find posts that still impress, with information that is as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies are a collection of what I consider some of the best posts during that time.
Who’d a thunk it? A world I wrote about 5 years ago that I hoped I wouldn’t live to see has already happened and I’m still here. Bummer.
It’s a world of instant solutions, from quasi-immortality, postmortem tweets from soon-to-be-launched LivesOn, to futurist Ayesha Khanna’s idea for smart contact lenses that would make homeless people disappear from view—out of sight/out of mind.
Solutionists err by assuming, rather than investigating, the problems they set out to tackle. Given Silicon Valley’s digital hammers, all problems start looking like nails, and all solutions like apps.
And then there is Seesaw, which allows you to “crowdsource absolutely every decision in your life” and practically guarantees siloed, homogenized attitudes over the long-term.
The drive seems to be to avoid thinking in general, let alone any of the less comfortable deep thinking required to mature and develop anything vaguely resembling wisdom.
Leszek Kolakowski argued that, given that we are regularly confronted with equally valid choices where painful ethical reflection is in order, being inconsistent is the only way to avoid becoming a doctrinaire ideologue who sticks to an algorithm. For Kolakowski, absolute consistency is identical to fanaticism.
Or as Emerson said long before the rise of today’s technology, “A foolish Consistency is the hobgoblins of little minds, adored by little statesmen, philosophers, and divines. With consistency, a great soul simply has nothing to do.”
The main problem with so many innovators is that they want to solve problems with an algorithm, which ignores the entire messy human equation; much like medicine desperately wants to believe that one-dose-fits-all.
Nor, in the rush to innovate, do they give much thought as to the longer-term effects of their miracles.
The interactive dialog provided by digital media was hailed as a way to draw millions more into the dialog, which sounds great until you look at the real effect of negative comments on stories.
Comments from some readers, our research shows, can significantly distort what other readers think was reported in the first place. (…) The results were both surprising and disturbing. Uncivil comments not only polarized readers, but they often changed a participant’s interpretation of the news story itself.
Turns out it’s not so much the comment, but the tone that has the greatest effect.
So. No discussion, no disagreement within your little world, no ethical dilemmas, no deep thinking, mental struggle, stretching or growing.
Have you heard of/read Malcolm Berko? He writes a twice-a-week column answering financial/investment questions — just one answer in each column.
In addition to being broadly educated and financially knowledgeable, he is a superb and truly witty writer, doesn’t suffer fools at all, and, after reading him for decades, has no sacred cows. (I highly recommend him.)
I thought this recent question and his response would explain the coverage, and downright scare hype, surrounding AI, robots and the tech upheaval of many industries, such as retail.
Here is the salient part of the question.
My professor believes that “its disruptive pricing power chokes employment, restrains wage growth and is bankrupting competitors.” He believes that Amazon is “too negatively impactive on our economy, especially wages, and must be restrained by government-decreed divestiture.”
Berko wasted few words on what he thought of the prof and went on to explain as follows:
Joseph Schumpeter, a brilliant economist and bald as an egg, who passed away in 1950, explained capitalism as a series 50- to 60-year waves of technological revolutions causing gales of creative destruction, or GCDs, in which old industries are swept away and replaced by new industries. These new industries generate new economic activity, employing more people, who buy more products, creating more demand and, resultantly, increased employment.
First GCD, between the 1780s and 1840s, was fueled by steam power. During those years, the steam engine increased our gross domestic product fivefold, and employment grew fourfold.
Second GCD, between the 1840s and 1890s, the railroads replaced wagon trains, stagecoaches and sailing ships. (…) Resultantly, our GDP exploded sixfold, and employment grew fivefold.
Third GDC, between the 1890s and the 1940s, was charged by electricity. Inexpensive electrical power hugely improved industrial efficiency and labor productivity. This bred a sixfold growth in GDP and a fourfold rise in our working population.
Fourth GDC between the 1940s and the 1990s was powered by oil and the automobile. People moved to the suburbs and families owned two cars as the GDP increased eightfold and the workforce grew fivefold.
Fifth GDC is information technology and the microchip. It’s making other technologies obsolete and altering our social, cultural, political and economic futures in ways we never imagined possible. We’re on the cusp of that wave today.
Excellent for understanding what’s happening, but what neither Schumpeter nor Berko adress is the enormous upheaval, fear and human pain that comes with each wave.
It is terrifying to be told that skills you have worked to develop and hone for 5, 10 or 20 years, or longer, have no value.
But in today’s world, where what-you-do-is-who-you-are, that often means that you, the person, has no value.
While Berko is correct about the potential of an unimaginable future, which you may not even live to see, that future is of little solace and does nothing to mitigate the terror and economic woes facing you today or tomorrow.
Two parts of the solution is to put your energy into coping and immediately develop the most important skill/attitude they probably didn’t bother teaching you in school.
Learn to love learning.
PS I sincerely hope you take the time to read Berko’s full column. I guarantee it will be time well spent, as are all him writings.
Unanimous AI is an artificial intelligence platform that claims to make super-intelligent decisions based on the wisdom of the crowd, but not in small numbers.
Apparently, crunching big numbers can provide some amazing results.
When the company has held these swarms, the group has correctly predicted the winners of the 2015 Oscars, the first four horses of the 2016 Kentucky Derby in 2016, and the eight teams that would make it to the 2016 MLB playoffs, including the Chicago Cubs’ victory.
You have to admit those results are pretty impressive (especially the Cubs’ victory).
Long story short, after crunching the data access to clean water was the “winner.”
Two things have happened since then — one you couldn’t help noticing and the other more esoteric.
Hurricane Harvey brought the issue of clean water front and center in most people’s minds; Harvey changed the focus from “somewhere else” to “home.”
According to the study, while smiling during face-to-face communication was perceived as warm and indicated more competence with regards to the first impressions created, a text-based representation of a smile in computer-mediated communication did not have the same effect.
“Our findings provide first-time evidence that, contrary to actual smiles, smileys do not increase perceptions of warmth and actually decrease perceptions of competence,” said Ella Glikson, a post-doctorate fellow at the BGU Department of Management, Guilford Glazer Faculty of Business and Management.
Anyone can benefit from penmanship’s cognitive benefits, whether you’re taking notes at a meeting or just trying to figure out what you think.
Put another way, writing by hand engages your brain, while keyboarding does not.
Brain scans during the two activities also show that forming words by hand as opposed to on a keyboard leads to increased brain activity (pdf). Scientific studies of children and adults show that wielding a pen when taking notes, rather than typing, is associated with improved long-term information retention, better thought organization, and increased ability to generate ideas.
Writing by hand forces you to turn off distractions, whether smartphone, computer, or music.
Writing by hand forces you to focus.
Writing by hand forces you to really listen; it makes you process what is being said and be more selective in what you record as opposed to running on autopilot.
If you never learned to write by hand, or have forgotten how, there are classes.
A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read allIf the Shoe Fits posts here.
The top stories currently engaging the tech world and spilling over to the real world are the Google memo and Uber.
A major underlying point of the memo is how unnecessary soft skills, such as empathy are in tech, which has been soundly refuted.
Tech is an umbrella term embraced by a wide range of industries; hence there is fintech, medtech, legaltech, etc.
The inclusion of the word indicates that companies within that industry, frequently startups, are revamping/revolutionizing the business using various kinds of technology.
But none of it happens in a vacuum.
No matter how large or small or how disruptive — from Uber to a solitary founder — they are still part of a larger community.
Consider Uber.
It’s ideal because it is a perfect microcosm of a disruptive startup, with the machinations, interactions and effects on its industry and society in general, since it includes all the elements — positive and negative.
Founders take note.
Uber’s storyline hasn’t moved in a straight line, nor will it in the future, because it involves people.
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
Entrepreneurs are great, although I have to admit that the entitled, connected, mostly white, bros of Silicon Valley aren’t among the ones I like and respect.
Two stories today made me really happy.
