Disruptive Innovation in Healthcare

Bob Kocher, former Special Assistant to President Obama for Healthcare and Economic Policy once asked me:

"You are in healthcare?  Are you going to fix it?"

This is a great article on CIO.com that touches on the main points on why it is broken and what will be needed to one day fix it.

In the article it states that the problem can be boiled down to two issues:

1. Innovation has been sustaining as opposed to disruptive while the process remains largely centralized.
2. Hospitals offer the value of solving any problem for any patient, he says, but the overhead of that complexity leads to tremendous costs.

This reminds me of the debate when the large car manufacturers were bleeding money:  should the government subsidize them and get them back on their feet?  Or should the government let these automotive powerhouses die out and let nature take its course.

In the case of healthcare, disruption on this scale is necessary.  Although it will be painful for everyone at first, it is the only way to solve this massive problem long term.  No amount of band aids can fix the current healthcare system as is.  

Google Ventures largest investment in a medical tech startup

Google Ventures just invested $130M in Flatiron Health, a start-up that organizes real-time oncology data to help cancer patients and doctors.  Their flagship product, OncoAnalytics or OncologyCloud provides "World-class analytics and business intelligence for cancer care providers."

OncologyCloud by Flatiron Health

Flatiron Health, which launched in 2012 and is currently in beta, collects information by connecting cancer treatment center around the world on its cloud-based technology platform, with the goal of allowing researchers, physicians, and patients to learn from aggregated data collected from millions of cases. It hopes that this will allow doctors to provide better care and enable patients to make data-driven decisions.

Data driven decisions to better enable patients and lead to better outcomes?  Yes, please.

Cognitive Analytics: Top 10 Digital Tech Trend

Deloitte Consulting LLP recently released its "5th Annual Tech Trends Report".  In this report it lists its top 10 overall trends, keying on 5 disruptors (opportunities for technology executives to create sustainable positive changes in IT capabilities, business operations and business models) and 5 enablers (technologies in which many organizations have already invested, but new developments and opportunities have inspired new business applications, thereby warranting a fresh look).

Cognitive Analytics is listed as one of the Disruptors.  By definition Cognitive Analytics is a computing platform that combines artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, natural language processing (NLP) and   massively parallel computing to drive rich insights that can aid real time decision making.  The video below shows Rajeev Ronanki, a principal at Deloitte, explaining how cognitive analytics is used in a business situation by a national healthcare plan to use big data to gain real insights.