Name: Brainstorm Health: A Technologist's Take on Healthcare
Uploaded: 2019-07-08
Duration: 6 min 29 s
Description: Color cofounder and CEO Othman Laraki lays out three healthcare challenges, and how technology can solve them.

It's pretty late in the day. So I thought I'd start off by talking about three things that give most of us in healthcare a panic attack on a regular basis. The first one is the fact that it feels like healthcare system overall is on a knife's edge, right? Like costs keep going up. We're spending too much margins are going down. It's kinda like that's one always one big topic. The second one is that people are kind of pissed off. I assume a lot of people saw the people protesting outside. One of the things that's happened over the last 15 years is that most of our lives have gotten deeply personalized and customized. And we feel that the world revolves around us, right? It feels like all the world's drivers coordinate, so that there's magically always a few of them, that are within five minutes to pick me up in case I need to be taken somewhere. But healthcare is stark contrast relative to that. Our experience with healthcare, is a very big gap, relative to what people expect of us today. And the third one is that, the Bavarians are at the gates, you know they are called, Apple, Google, Amazon, Brookshire etcetera, half of Silicon Valley, and I think for most of us in this space depending on which aspect of it you are working on, and from the topics of conversation today is that we feel that technology is a big part of the solution. But, if technology or healthcare follows a similar track as other industries that have been deeply transformed through technology over the last 15 years. If you take retail, transportation, media, one of the things that seems to often be the case is that early on we Get really excited about the magical nature of technology. We think about AI machine learning as being the solution to the really hard problems. But when we look back, one of the things that tends to be the case is that it's more the leverage aspect of technology that deeply transformed all these industries. Like Amazon changed retail not because of Because their much better at ranking what we might wanna buy. But just because when I want something, it shows up to my doorsteps in less than 24 hours. That's logistics. That's not machine learning. And in health care, I thought I would share just three perspectives or three areas that are already deeply transformed from a Logistic standpoint in healthcare that are more likely to be some of the big sources of system- level transformation over the next few years. So one of the main functions of technology is that it takes things that used to be expensive and painful and make them easy and abundant. And three of these things that in healthcare still feel scarce but actually are becoming much less so, are capacity, context, and transactions. So I'll run through a few examples of each one of these. On the capacity side We're used to everything we do in healthcare as being incredibly expensive, right? The unit of work in healthcare, the unit of capacity is by buying buildings and putting people inside them, and then we try to put telemedicine, where we just add a phone on either end, but really we're still moving people in buildings. One of the big things that is happening right now, I think that is a big aspect of the logistics, is taking parts of what we think of as health care and effectively virtualizing them. And moving them into these utility types of services. Three examples that are quite diverse but I think are quite interesting to think about One is, if you look at something like PillPark that Amazon acquired about a year ago, it took pharmacy services that normally requires to place buildings next to where people live and turning it more into utility that get plugged into a bunch of different applications. Another example that I think is fascinating is A company called zip line that that we're the founder is going to be talking about later today. Again, taking things that in healthcare that normally require huge amount of infrastructure that and absolving us of that. Another example is with services. So when, for example, my company color For genetic counseling, we virtualized that into a service such that we were able to provide it at a higher capacity that any individual Hospital in the us right now. The second big area that is quite interesting is when you think about context, when you think about all of the. Overhead and the effort that we spent. A lot of this is really just re- establishing context. When you show up to a doctor's office, the first thing you do is you get a clip board to re- introduce yourself. And if you think of that in comparison to other aspects of our lives, right. Imagine if. You wanna pick up an Uber ride, then every time you need to enter where you are and reintroduce yourself, right? And the question is, what does that look like in healthcare? So the interesting thing is that already today there is more health data, more insight about your health, unless you're an actually kind of in a disease state. Outside of the health system and is already on your phone, like your phone knows whether you're depressed well before it gets entered into the EMR. And the final one that I was I would like to share is around transactions. We still think of every interaction with the health system is being a high cost transaction And the question is what does it look like when we turn this into micro transactions? It's the difference between buying a car and taking an Uber ride and when we think of that in the context of healthcare it's similar to Amazon instead of the way they change our behavior is not by making us want to buy more things, in healthcare we try to make change behavior by. We talked about adherence, behavior management. And one of the biggest hurdles is literally just making things easier, just reducing the friction. So, in many ways, I think the good news is that it's less than magic that we need and more the using the lever that we already have. And putting in some elbow grease to hopefully move the world. Thank you very much. [ APPLAUSE ]

Brainstorm Health: A Technologist's Take on Healthcare

Tech

Color cofounder and CEO Othman Laraki lays out three healthcare challenges, and how technology can solve them.