Category Archives: entrepreneurship

business, data saving lives, entrepreneurship, healthy habits, meaning, policy, rapid learning health systems

FDA rearguard frame…

It’s all happening anyway. Eventually, the tide will surge and the wall will burst.

Already, an explosion of monitoring, testing, and sensing devices are coming on the market, providing consumers with instant analysis of their fitness, blood chemistry, sleep patterns and food intake. It’s only a matter of time before regulators feel compelled by consumer demand to find a way to accommodate better and cheaper innovations, and for slowly changing industries to dramatically restructure themselves in the face of overwhelming new opportunities. The long-term potential of vast databases of genomic data to improve health outcomes, reduce costs, and reorient the debate on medical priorities is too valuable to be held back for long — and arguably the biggest transformation for the healthcare industry since the discovery of antibiotics in the early 20th century.

http://www.wired.com/opinion/2014/01/the-fda-may-win-the-battle-this-holiday-season-but-23andme-will-win-the-war/

Regulating 23andMe to Death Won’t Stop the New Age of Genetic Testing

  • BY LARRY DOWNES AND PAUL NUNES
  • 01.01.14
  • 6:30 AM

 

Image: ynse/Flickr

 

Market disruptions often occur — or not — as the direct result of unintended collisions between breakthrough technologies and their more incremental regulators. In the latest dust-up, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) last month ordered startup 23andMe to stop marketing its $99 genetic analysis kit, just before the Christmas shopping season kicked into high gear.

To date, over half a million customers have taken the swab in return for detailed ancestry data and personalized information on 248 genetic traits and health conditions. The company, which launched in 2007 with substantial backing from Google, has been working closely — albeit more slowly than the FDA would have liked — with the FDA to ensure it complies with federal health and safety regulations. But the agency concluded in its recent warning letter that 23andMe was marketing a “device” that was “intended for use in the diagnosis of diseases or other conditions,” and as such, its marketing materials required pre-approval from the FDA, which includes extensive research studies.

23andMe is an example of what we call a “Big Bang Disruption” — a product or service innovation that undermines existing markets and industries seemingly overnight by being simultaneously better andcheaper than the competition. What’s happening in genomic testing (and healthcare in general) is consistent with our research in over 30 different industry segments, from manufacturing to financial services to consumer products.

When technologies improve exponentially, many industry incumbents — and the regulators who oversee them — are kept constantly off-balance. That’s because incumbents have been indoctrinated by a generation of academic literature and MBA training to ignore disruptive products until they had a chance to mature in the market, assuming they would first appear as cheaper but inferior substitutes that would only appeal to niche market segments.

Doctors — who are also incumbents in this situation — are struggling to respond to disruptive medical technologies that change the power dynamic in the patient relationship. Several 23andMe users have reported taking the FDA’s advice of reviewing their genetic results with their physicians, only to find the doctors unprepared, unwilling, or downright hostile to helping interpret the data.

Often, incumbents’ only competitive response — or the only one they can think of — is to run to the regulators. That’s what’s has been happening to car-sharing services such as Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar; to private drone makers; and casual accommodation services such as Airbnb, to name just a few examples. And now it’s happening to 23andMe, one of hundreds of new startups aimed at giving healthcare consumers more and better information about their own bodies — information that has long been under the exclusive and increasingly expensive control of medical professionals.

Absent any real law on the subject, the agency has strained credulity to categorize 23andMe’s product as a diagnostic “device” — making it subject to its most stringent oversight. The FDA’s letter focuses intently on the potential that consumers will both under- and over-react to the genetic information revealed. The agency fears that users will pressure their doctors for potentially unnecessary surgery or medication to treat conditions for which they are genetically pre-disposed, for example. And it assumes that the costs of such information abuse outweigh any benefits — none of which are mentioned in the agency’s analysis.

The company, of course, has agreed to comply with the FDA’s stern warning, and has ceased providing its customers with anything other than hereditary data. For now. Perhaps it will reach some accommodation with the agency, or perhaps the FDA’s ire will prove untamable, an end to the innovative startup and whatever value its technology might have delivered.

But as with every Big Bang Disruptor in our study, winning the battle and winning the war are two very different things.

The FDA is applying a least common denominator standard to 23andMe, and applying it arbitrarily. Already, an explosion of monitoring, testing, and sensing devices are coming on the market, providing consumers with instant analysis of their fitness, blood chemistry, sleep patterns and food intake. It’s only a matter of time before regulators feel compelled by consumer demand to find a way to accommodate better and cheaper innovations, and for slowly changing industries to dramatically restructure themselves in the face of overwhelming new opportunities. The long-term potential of vast databases of genomic data to improve health outcomes, reduce costs, and reorient the debate on medical priorities is too valuable to be held back for long — and arguably the biggest transformation for the healthcare industry since the discovery of antibiotics in the early 20th century.

The information flood is coming. If not this Christmas season, then one in the near future. Before long, $100 will get you sequencing of not just the million genes 23andMe currently examines, but all of them. Regulators and medical practitioners must focus their attention not on raising temporary obstacles, but on figuring out how they can make the best use of this inevitable tidal wave of information.

Whatever the outcome for 23andMe, this is a losing battle for industry incumbents who believe they can hold back the future forever.

 

Larry Downes & Paul Nunes

Larry Downes and Paul Nunes are co-authors of Big Bang Disruption: Strategy in the Age of Devastating Innovation (Penguin Portfolio 2014). Downes is Research Fellow with the Accenture Institute for High Performance, where Nunes serves as its Global Managing Director of Research. Their book has been selected as a 2014 book of the year by the Consumer Electronics Association.

entrepreneurship, musings

There’s something about TED

  • excellent talk by a Visual Arts Professor about the light, deceptive folly of TED
  • despite the entirely valid criticisms, I think TED still fills a void in the public discourse
  • placebo technoradicalism
  • middlebrow megachurch infotainment

We need to talk about TED

Science, philosophy and technology run on the model of American Idol – as embodied by TED talks – is a recipe for civilisational disaster
theguardian.com, 
In our culture, talking about the future is sometimes a polite way of saying things about the present that would otherwise be rude or risky.

But have you ever wondered why so little of the future promised in TED talks actually happens? So much potential and enthusiasm, and so little actual change. Are the ideas wrong? Or is the idea about what ideas can do all by themselves wrong?

I write about entanglements of technology and culture, how technologies enable the making of certain worlds, and at the same time how culture structures how those technologies will evolve, this way or that. It’s where philosophy and design intersect.

So the conceptualization of possibilities is something that I take very seriously. That’s why I, and many people, think it’s way past time to take a step back and ask some serious questions about the intellectual viability of things like TED.

So my TED talk is not about my work or my new book – the usual spiel – but about TED itself, what it is and why it doesn’t work.

The first reason is over-simplification.

To be clear, I think that having smart people who do very smart things explain what they doing in a way that everyone can understand is a good thing. But TED goes way beyond that.

Let me tell you a story. I was at a presentation that a friend, an astrophysicist, gave to a potential donor. I thought the presentation was lucid and compelling (and I’m a professor of visual arts here at UC San Diego so at the end of the day, I know really nothing about astrophysics). After the talk the sponsor said to him, “you know what, I’m gonna pass because I just don’t feel inspired …you should be more like Malcolm Gladwell.”

At this point I kind of lost it. Can you imagine?

Think about it: an actual scientist who produces actual knowledge should be more like a journalist who recycles fake insights! This is beyond popularisation. This is taking something with value and substance and coring it out so that it can be swallowed without chewing. This is not the solution to our most frightening problems – rather this is one of our most frightening problems.

So I ask the question: does TED epitomize a situation where if a scientist’s work (or an artist’s or philosopher’s or activist’s or whoever) is told that their work is not worthy of support, because the public doesn’t feel good listening to them?

I submit that astrophysics run on the model of American Idol is a recipe for civilizational disaster.

What is TED?

So what is TED exactly?

Perhaps it’s the proposition that if we talk about world-changing ideas enough, then the world will change. But this is not true, and that’s the second problem.

TED of course stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and I’ll talk a bit about all three. I Think TED actually stands for: middlebrow megachurch infotainment.

The key rhetorical device for TED talks is a combination of epiphany and personal testimony (an “epiphimony” if you like ) through which the speaker shares a personal journey of insight and realisation, its triumphs and tribulations.

What is it that the TED audience hopes to get from this? A vicarious insight, a fleeting moment of wonder, an inkling that maybe it’s all going to work out after all? A spiritual buzz?

I’m sorry but this fails to meet the challenges that we are supposedly here to confront. These are complicated and difficult and are not given to tidy just-so solutions. They don’t care about anyone’s experience of optimism. Given the stakes, making our best and brightest waste their time – and the audience’s time – dancing like infomercial hosts is too high a price. It is cynical.

Also, it just doesn’t work.

Recently there was a bit of a dust up when TEDGlobal sent out a note toTEDx organisers asking them not to not book speakers whose work spans the paranormal, the conspiratorial, new age “quantum neuroenergy”, etc: what is called woo. Instead of these placebos, TEDx should instead curate talks that are imaginative but grounded in reality.  In fairness, they took some heat, so their gesture should be acknowledged. A lot of people take TED very seriously, and might lend credence to specious ideas if stamped with TED credentials. “No” to placebo science and medicine.

But … the corollaries of placebo science and placebo medicine areplacebo politics and placebo innovation. On this point, TED has a long way to go.

Perhaps the pinnacle of placebo politics and innovation was featured at TEDx San Diego in 2011. You’re familiar I assume with Kony2012, the social media campaign to stop war crimes in central Africa? So what happened here? Evangelical surfer bro goes to help kids in Africa. He makes a campy video explaining genocide to the cast of Glee. The world finds his public epiphany to be shallow to the point of self-delusion. The complex geopolitics of central Africa are left undisturbed. Kony’s still there. The end.

You see, when inspiration becomes manipulation, inspiration becomes obfuscation. If you are not cynical you should be sceptical. You should be as sceptical of placebo politics as you are placebo medicine.

T and Technology

T – E – D. I’ll go through them each quickly.

So first technology …

We hear that not only is change accelerating but that the pace of change is accelerating as well. While this is true of computational carrying-capacity at a planetary level, at the same time – and in fact the two are connected – we are also in a moment of cultural de-acceleration.

We invest our energy in futuristic information technologies, including our cars, but drive them home to kitsch architecture copied from the 18th century. The future on offer is one in which everything changes, so long as everything stays the same. We’ll have Google Glass, but still also business casual.

This timidity is our path to the future? No, this is incredibly conservative, and there is no reason to think that more gigaflops will inoculate us.

Because, if a problem is in fact endemic to a system, then the exponential effects of Moore’s law also serve to amplify what’s broken. It is more computation along the wrong curve, and I doubt this is necessarily a triumph of reason.

Part of my work explores deep technocultural shifts, from post-humanism to the post-anthropocene, but TED’s version has too much faith in technology, and not nearly enough commitment to technology. It isplacebo technoradicalism, toying with risk so as to reaffirm the comfortable.

So our machines get smarter and we get stupider. But it doesn’t have to be like that. Both can be much more intelligent. Another futurism is possible.

E and economics

A better ‘E’ in TED would stand for economics, and the need for, yes imagining and designing, different systems of valuation, exchange, accounting of transaction externalities, financing of coordinated planning, etc. Because states plus markets, states versus markets, these are insufficient models, and our conversation is stuck in Cold War gear.

Worse is when economics is debated like metaphysics, as if the reality of a system is merely a bad example of the ideal.

Communism in theory is an egalitarian utopia.

Actually existing communism meant ecological devastation, government spying, crappy cars and gulags.

Capitalism in theory is rocket ships, nanomedicine, and Bono saving Africa.

Actually existing capitalism means Walmart jobs, McMansions, people living in the sewers under Las Vegas, Ryan Seacrest … plus – ecological devastation, government spying, crappy public transportation and for-profit prisons.

Our options for change range from basically what we have plus a little more Hayek, to what we have plus a little more Keynes. Why?

The most recent centuries have seen extraordinary accomplishments in improving quality of life. The paradox is that the system we have now –whatever you want to call it – is in the short term what makes the amazing new technologies possible, but in the long run it is also what suppresses their full flowering. Another economic architecture is prerequisite.

D and design

Instead of our designers prototyping the same “change agent for good” projects over and over again, and then wondering why they don’t get implemented at scale, perhaps we should resolve that design is not some magic answer. Design matters a lot, but for very different reasons. It’s easy to get enthusiastic about design because, like talking about the future, it is more polite than referring to white elephants in the room.

Such as…

Phones, drones and genomes, that’s what we do here in San Diego and La Jolla. In addition to the other insanely great things these technologies do, they are the basis of NSA spying, flying robots killing people, and the wholesale privatisation of biological life itself. That’s also what we do.

The potential for these technologies are both wonderful and horrifying at the same time, and to make them serve good futures, design as “innovation” just isn’t a strong enough idea by itself. We need to talk more about design as “immunisation,” actively preventing certain potential “innovations” that we do not want from happening.

And so…

As for one simple take away … I don’t have one simple take away, one magic idea. That’s kind of the point. I will say that if and when the key problems facing our species were to be solved, then perhaps many of us in this room would be out of work (and perhaps in jail).

But it’s not as though there is a shortage of topics for serious discussion. We need a deeper conversation about the difference between digital cosmopolitanism and cloud feudalism (and toward that, a queer history of computer science and Alan Turing’s birthday as holiday!)

I would like new maps of the world, ones not based on settler colonialism, legacy genomes and bronze age myths, but instead on something more … scalable.

TED today is not that.

Problems are not “puzzles” to be solved. That metaphor assumes that all the necessary pieces are already on the table, they just need to be rearranged and reprogrammed. It’s not true.

“Innovation” defined as moving the pieces around and adding more processing power is not some Big Idea that will disrupt a broken status quo: that precisely is the broken status quo.

One TED speaker said recently, “If you remove this boundary … the only boundary left is our imagination”. Wrong.

If we really want transformation, we have to slog through the hard stuff (history, economics, philosophy, art, ambiguities, contradictions). Bracketing it off to the side to focus just on technology, or just on innovation, actually prevents transformation.

Instead of dumbing-down the future, we need to raise the level of general understanding to the level of complexity of the systems in which we are embedded and which are embedded in us. This is not about “personal stories of inspiration”, it’s about the difficult and uncertain work of demystification and reconceptualisation: the hard stuff that really changes how we think. More Copernicus, less Tony Robbins.

At a societal level, the bottom line is if we invest in things that make us feel good but which don’t work, and don’t invest in things that don’t make us feel good but which may solve problems, then our fate is that it will just get harder to feel good about not solving problems.

In this case the placebo is worse than ineffective, it’s harmful. It’s divertsyour interest, enthusiasm and outrage until it’s absorbed into this black hole of affectation.

Keep calm and carry on “innovating” … is that the real message of TED? To me that’s not inspirational, it’s cynical.

In the US the rightwing has certain media channels that allow it to bracket reality … other constituencies have TED.

• This article first appeared on Benjamin Bratton’s website and is republished with permission. It is the text of a talk given at TEDx San Diego

entrepreneurship

Minimally invasive management

 

December 27, 2013

To Manage Well, Get Out of the Way

Management, like payroll and sales, is becoming another function to facilitate the work of the technically and creatively skilled people who do the heavy lifting. We need managers, not because people need a boss, but because people need someone to resolve the issues that are stopping them from doing their work.

Managers aren’t ball carriers. They’re running interference for the ball carriers. In the world of minimally invasive management, managers have three primary jobs:

  • they need to hire
  • they need to develop and serve their people, and
  • they need to fire.

But most of the time, managers need to get out of the way and let people do their work.

data saving lives, entrepreneurship, facts & data points

WIRED: Analytics in 2014

  • Recently, Bain & Co surveyed executives at more than 400 companies around the world (most with revenues of more than one billion dollars). It found that only four percent of companies are really good at analytics, an elite group that puts into play the right people, tools, data and willpower into their analytic initiatives. This elite group is already using insights to change the way they improve their products and services. And the difference is already quite stark:
    • Twice as likely to be in the top quartile of financial performance within their industries
    • Three times more likely to execute decisions as intended
    • Five times more likely to make decisions faster
    • As healthcare industry’s payer/provider model undergoes systemic reformatting, the smart players are already making game-changing moves. Kaiser Permanente is blending various data sources to improve enrollment and primary care. Colorado Hospital Association is modeling future impacts of Obamacare as it is (slowly) rolling out. Cardinal Health is optimizing the efficiency of their product distribution to hospital networks
  • software providers need to answer the call for providing better tools to support the current generation of analytic minds that are destined to change the world.
  • The new guard software firms – Alteryx, Cloudera, Tableau, and others – are growing 30-80 percent annually mainly by disrupting their comparable mega-vendors (3-8% growth).

 

Source: http://www.wired.com/insights/2013/12/analytics-eats-world-2014/

Analytics Eats the World in 2014

  • BY GEORGE MATHEW, ALTERYX
  • 12.23.13
  • 3:02 PM

Old-school Big Data: A huge disk from the c1967 Atlas Disc file. Image: dullhunk/Flickr

Old-school Big Data: A huge disk from the c1967 Atlas Disc file. Will analytics eat the world in 2014? Have your say below. Image: dullhunk/Flickr

 

As 2013 is quickly coming to a close, I return to Marc Andreessen’s seminal thesis that Software is Eating the World. It amazes me to see how much analytics is the metabolic agent driving this shift. Whether analytics is explicitly emphasized in your company’s DNA or it’s invisibly embedded into your business processes; it is the defining value driver of our generation. For industries and firms that embrace this reality, the rewards will be disproportional. To those who don’t make the shift to a data-driven culture: you will be left behind.

Recently, Bain & Co surveyed executives at more than 400 companies around the world (most with revenues of more than one billion dollars). It found that only four percent of companies are really good at analytics, an elite group that puts into play the right people, tools, data and willpower into their analytic initiatives. This elite group is already using insights to change the way they improve their products and services. And the difference is already quite stark:

  • Twice as likely to be in the top quartile of financial performance within their industries
  • Three times more likely to execute decisions as intended
  • Five times more likely to make decisions faster

Industrial Reinvention

Cutting-edge analytics has been integral for the consumer Internet (e.g. mobile gaming). Going into 2014, the reinvention of mainstream industries is where the substantial breakthroughs are occurring:

  • In automotive sector, we see both the emphasis on the culture of analytics at Ford (the only one of the big three that didn’t go through bankruptcy) and in the state-of-the-art in embedded analytics in the Tesla Model S.
  • While Blockbuster shuts down their last retail location in 2013, Redbox is witnessing hyper-growth in their brick-and-mortar DVD rental model through predictive modeling of consumer behavior.
  • As healthcare industry’s payer/provider model undergoes systemic reformatting, the smart players are already making game-changing moves. Kaiser Permanente is blending various data sources to improve enrollment and primary care. Colorado Hospital Association is modeling future impacts of Obamacare as it is (slowly) rolling out. Cardinal Health is optimizing the efficiency of their product distribution to hospital networks.

2014 Predictions

The industry examples mentioned above are just a thin sliver of this enormous watershed. My fundamental belief is that if you are not already ‘moneyballing’ your respective industry, someone is else is already doing it. Some of the drivers that will come to bear in 2014 include:

  • Analysts will matter more than data scientists. There are more than 2.5 Million data analysts in line-of-business functions serving the analytic needs of firms. As much as we wish data science will solve all the world’s analytic problems; there simply aren’t enough data scientists to go around. At the same time, software providers need to answer the call for providing better tools to support the current generation of analytic minds that are destined to change the world.
  • Hadoop moves from curiosity to critical. Hadoop is quickly becoming the general-purpose compute infrastructure for storing well … everything. You can already see this in all the new engines such (e.g. OLTP, real-time, graph, and search) that are already being supported by the Hadoop community.
  • Big Data brings its A-game in marketing. Analytics will have another big year in the Marketing Department influencing advertising, promotions, and consumer behavior. Specifically, sports marketing will put enormous advertising budgets in play as the World Cup in Brazil and the Winter Olympics in Russia.

The New Guard in Analytics

As the 2014 predictions play out, the need for a purpose-built analytics experience is never more real. It is also clear that yesterday’s software was not built for today’s analytics needs:

  • We should never have to worry about the source or shape of the data that is in the hands of data analysts. We should be able to easily blend data across structured, unstructured, and semi-structured sources seamlessly.
  • We should not be dealing with clumsy, 40-year-old programming languages (you know who you are), instead using the sleek, modern algorithms represented in R and Julia.
  • We should not have to deal with unwieldy reporting and dashboard platforms, but treat every data interaction with the ease and visual grace of Tableau.

This is now playing out the financial outcomes in the analytics software market. Yesterday’s mega-vendors are seeing their growth slow to three to eight percent annually. The new guard with Alteryx, Cloudera, Tableau, and others are growing 30-80 percent annually mainly by disrupting their comparable mega-vendors. Clearly, 2013 is ending with a groundswell of analytic users voting for change with their wallets. This will only continue to accelerate, as Marc’s perspective on software becomes prophecy. As we enter 2014, I’m just thrilled to be working on mainstreaming analytics (the main course) as it drives the generational shift of our times.

George Mathew is president and COO of Alteryx. He is on Twitter @gkm1.

complex adaptive systems, cool, entrepreneurship, meaning, policy, politics, rapid learning health systems

Antifragile – Taleb at the RSA

This hour long presentation covers the key points from Taleb’s Antifragile. It doesn’t matter how often I read or listen to this, it still comes across as massive. Interesting that the UK conservatives are taking it up with vigor, hmm….

Big Ideas page: http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bigideas/antifragile/4501692

RSA page: http://www.thersa.org/events/audio-and-past-events/2012/antifragile

Full RSA audio link

Antifragile

Tuesday 12 February 2013 8:05PM

 

In 2006 Nassim Taleb came to prominence with the publication of The Black Swanand the idea that the world is full of highly improbably and unpredictable events. In his latest book Antifragile he explains how to live with, and respond to, these seemingly random and unforeseen black swan events.

The key he says is to create systems that are Antifragile; ones that are not simply robust or resilient but can adapt and improve when subjected to uncertainty, chaos and volatility.

Highlights of Antifragile – RSA (UK) 6th Dec. 2012

Guests

Nassim Taleb
Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at New York University’s Polytechnic Institute.
Author of ‘Antifragile: how to live in a world we don’t understand’ (Allen Lane, 2012).
Rohan Silva
Senior policy adviser to UK Prime Minister, David Cameron.
Fraser Nelson
Editor, The Spectator (UK)

Further Information

The RSA

Credits

Presenter
Paul Barclay
Abridger
Ian Coombe
complex adaptive systems, cool, data saving lives, entrepreneurship, healthcare, healthy habits, nutrition, policy, quantified self, rapid learning health systems, research methodology, storytelling

Forcing the prevention industry – a 10 year journey

Vision

  • The Future of Human API www.thehumanapi.com
  • Forcing the prevention industry into existence
  • Stage Zero disease detection and treatment

Critical trends:

  • lab-in-a-box diagnostics
  • quantified self
  • medical printing

When these trends converge, there’ll be an inflection point where a market is established.

Health data moves from system of record >> system of engagement.

Promoting the evolution from a Product mentality to a Market mentality

As treatment starts to focus on Stage Zero/pre-clinical disease,  it turns into prevention.

 

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=gJHaoqeucX8

http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnnosta/2013/12/12/the-asymptotic-shift-from-disease-to-prevention-thoughts-for-digital-health

The Asymptotic Shift From Disease To Prevention–Thoughts For Digital Health

It’s been said that good artists borrow and great artist steal.  And I believe that Picasso was right.  So, I guess I’m somewhere between a thief and a artist and that suits me just fine.

I’ve stolen from two great thinkers, so let’s get that out of the way.  The first isDaniel Kraft, MD. Daniel Kraft is a Stanford and Harvard trained physician-scientist, inventor, entrepreneur, and innovator. He’s the founded and Executive Director of FutureMed, a program that explores convergent, rapidly developing technologies and their potential in biomedicine and healthcare. He’s also a go-to source on digital health. I’m stealing “zero stage disease” from Dr. Kraft. Simply put, it’s the concept of disease at its most early, sub-clinical stage.  It’s a point where interventions can halt or change a process and potentially eliminate any significant manifestation of disease.

The second source of inspiration is Richie Etwaru.  He is a brilliant and compelling speaker and a champion for global innovation, Mr. Etwaru, is responsible for defining and delivering the global next generation enterprise product suite for health and life sciences at Cegedim RelationshipManagement. His inspiring video, The Future of Human API really got me thinking.

At the heart of Mr. Etwaru’s discussion is the emergence of prevention–not treatment–as the “next big thing”.

EtwaruSlide

Ok, nothing new so far.  But the important changes seen in the digital health movement have given us a profound opportunity to move away from the conventional clinical identification of a that golf-ball sized tumor in your chest to a much more sophisticated and subtle observation. We are beginning to find a new disease stage–different from the numbers and letters seen in cancer staging.  The disease stage is getting closer and closer to zero.  It’s taking an asymptotic path that connects disease with prevention. The point here is that the holy grail of prevention isn’t born of health and wellness.  Prevention is born out of disease and our new-found ability to find it by looking closer and earlier.  Think quantified self and Google Calico.

And here lies the magic.

We all live in the era of disease.  And the vast majority of healthcare costs are spent after something happens. The simple reality is that prevention is difficult to fund and the health-economic model is so skewed to sickness and the end of life that it’s almost impossible to change. But if we can treat illness earlier and earlier–the concept of an asymptote–we build a model where prevention and disease share the very same border.  They become, in essence, the same. And it’s here that early, early, early disease stage recognition (Stage Zero) becomes prevention. The combination of passive (sensor mediated) observation and proactive life-style strategies for disease suppression can define a new era of health and wellness.

Keep Critical! Follow me on Twitter and stay healthy!

 

complex adaptive systems, cool, entrepreneurship, quantified self, rapid learning health systems, research methodology

NeuroOn sleep tracking mask…

Polyphasic sleep looks like something I want to get into, though am not convinced this is the way to achieve it. Will see how the trials go….

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/intelclinic/neuroon-worlds-first-sleep-mask-for-polyphasic-sle

The NeuroOn is for you!

The final prototype
The final prototype

What is polyphasic sleep?

It is a term referring to alternate sleep patterns that can reduce the required sleep time to just 2-6 hours daily. It involves breaking up your sleep into smaller parts throughout the day, which allows you to sleep less but feel as refreshed as if you slept for 8 hours or more.

Polyphasic sleep modes
Polyphasic sleep modes

Simply put, it’s a series of fine-tuned power naps that allow you to sleep effectively, rest better and perform at optimum energy levels during the day.

Additionally, NeuroOn monitored polyphasic sleep allows you to sync your body clock to very demanding schedules at whatever time is convenient or required.

In conclusion, through great sleep efficiency, Polyphasic sleep can give you an extra 4 hours of free time every day. That’s up to 28 hours (1 day+) a week, 1460 hours a year.

That’s right – Your year now has over 420 working days!

Trust the masters

So, you’ve heard of Leonardo? No, not the turtle!

Apparently Da Vinci, Tesla, Churchill and even Napoleon used polyphasic sleep to rest. It allowed them to fully regenerate, reducing sleep time to 6.5 hours or sometimes just 2 hours. And those guys got things done!

Famous polyphasic sleepers
Famous polyphasic sleepers
complex adaptive systems, cool, data saving lives, entrepreneurship, file note, healthcare, healthy habits, musings, nutrition, policy, politics, rapid learning health systems

Prevention Economics

Right. So I’m now comfortable with the idea that the greatest failing of modern healthcare is for it to have extended lifespan without having extended healthy life years. The challenge then, is to extend fully productive life to something far closer to our life expectancy. This can be done with a plant based diet, fasting and moderate exercise. No pills. No fads. Jus a new norm.

But how do we pay for it? Determine the economic cost of extending a life’s productivity by a year seems like a reasonable first step. Then take a piece of that?

Bring in the direct beneficiaries of such a change – the life insurers, super funds and broccoli farmers.

What a great bunch of business partners they’d be.

Giddy up….

complex adaptive systems, cool, data saving lives, entrepreneurship, file note, healthcare, healthy habits, meaning, musings, nutrition, policy, politics, quantified self, rapid learning health systems, research methodology

Healthways…

http://www.healthways.com  || http://www.healthways.com.au

Christian Sellars from MSD put on a terrific dinner in Crows Nest, inviting a group of interesting people to come meet with his team, with no agenda:

  • Dr Paul Nicolarakis, former advisor to the Health Minister
  • Dr Linda Swan, CEO Healthways
  • Ian Corless, Business Development & Program Manager, Wentwest
  • Dr Kevin Cheng, Project Lead Diabetes Care Project
  • Dr Stephen Barnett, GP & University of Wollongong
  •  Warren Brooks, Customer Centricity Lead
  • Brendan Price, Pricing Manager
  • Wayne Sparks, I.T. Director
  • Greg Lyubomirsky, Director, New Commercial Initiatives
  • Christian Sellars, Director, Access 

MSD are doing interesting things in health. In Christian’s words, they are trying to uncouple their future from pills.

After some chair swapping, I managed to sit across from Linda Swan from Healthways. It was terrific. She’s a Stephen Leeder disciple, spent time at MSD, would have been an actuary if she didn’t do medicine, and has been on a search that sounds similar to mine.

Healthways do data-driven, full-body, full-community wellness.

They’re getting $100M multi-years contracts from PHIs.

Amazingly, they’ve incorporated social determinants of health into their framework.

And even more amazingly, they’ve been given Iowa to make healthier.

They terraform communities – the whole lot.

Linda believes their most powerful intervention is a 20min evidence-based phone questionnaire administered to patients on returning home, similar to what Shane Solomon was rolling out at the HKHA. But they also supplant junk food sponsorship of sport and lobby for improvements to footpaths etc.

Just terrific. We’re catching up for coffee in January.

cool, entrepreneurship

Pollenizer’s Universal Pitch Deck – punchy, no faffing…

http://pollenizer.com/universal-startup-pitch-deck

  1. Hi, I’m….
    From….
  2. The problem we’re solving is…
  3. Our solution is…
  4. This is a big opportunity because…
  5. Our target market is…
  6. We will acquire customers by…
  7. We make money by…
  8. Our key competition is…
  9. We’re better because…
  10. Our team is…
  11. What we’ll do next is…
  12. Currently, we are seeking…
  13. To summarise…
  14. Thanks!