Health:Further

Greg Glassman is the founder and chairman of CrossFit, the wildly successful fitness and lifestyle company that now has over 14,000 gyms, known as CrossFit Boxes, worldwide. Greg is a health entrepreneur, a general in the health and wellness community, and something of an iconoclast. He has no problem going after the current biomedical and healthcare system, looking at root causes of the health and obesity crisis we find ourselves in today.

Daniel Hart is the President of the YourCare Universe at MEDHOST. Medhost/YCE was a sponsor of Health:Further this year. Daniel stopped by to talk about their new product, YourCareEverywhere, but more importantly, why it’s needed. In short, it's due to fragmentation and silos in healthcare. We need a way to look at all the useful health data in one place in order to make good decisions about our health and the care that we pursue. It’s definitely not the first time we’ve heard it on this podcast - bringing healthcare tools up to the level that other consumer tools currently exist at. Namely, making them simple, integrated, customized and actionable.

Today is the last episode that we recorded during the Health:Further Consumer Summit, sponsored by Sharecare. Dominique Wilkins is a hall of fame basketball player, who spent most of his career with the Atlanta Hawks. Today, he is the Hawks’ Vice President of Basketball and Special Advisor to the CEO. He is also a strong patient advocate, having helped out with numerous health-related organizations. Most notably, as someone who deals with diabetes himself, he is heavily involved in the diabetes community. He was in town to talk about the passion that drives him - as an athlete and advocate - and how passion plays into branding and pursuit of a company’s mission.

Kat Kinsman is all about two things - food and mental health advocacy. And, it turns out, the food industry and mental health are very closely linked, not necessarily for good reasons. Kat is a writer, an author, an editor, and someone who is getting out to talk about her struggles with anxiety and encourage others to do the same, especially in the world of food. She is pushing through her own challenges and working as a strong mental health advocate. Kat also has some thoughts for healthcare entrepreneurs, health tech startups, and even clinicians on how they can get involved in helping people struggling with mental health and behavioral health issues.

Hala Moddlemog is not in healthcare. Instead, she has led organizations ranging from food service, fast food, in Arby's and Church's Chicken, to patient advocacy and biomedical research support organizations in the Susan G. Komen Foundation. Today she leads the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, helping Atlanta grow and recruit top tier companies, as well as improve the quality of life for everyone in the city. Hala talks about how marketing is really a trust-building exercise, and how the health and healthcare communities should be using branding and marketing to build trust and relationships in order to help people live better, healthier lives.

Dr. Oz is a physician, a TV show host, and a healthcare entrepreneur  and founder. His company, Sharecare, produced the Health:Further Consumer Summit this year. Titled Disruption on Demand, the program looked at ideas from non-healthcare industries for creative consumer engagement, and how those lessons can be used to help individuals live healthier lives. Dr. Oz points to a couple of interesting things in this conversation. One, the importance of getting people to take action not through knowledge, but through emotion and a visceral response. People may know, but until they feel they won’t do anything. There also has to be trust involved in that process. The other thing Dr. Oz mentioned was customization. We are reaching a point thanks to health entrepreneurs and tech entrepreneurs where we have the technology to at least partly customize health advice, its mode of delivery, and its timing to hit each of us in the right way to take the appropriate action. That’s a big part of what Sharecare is doing with their platform, so we’ll see how it all plays out for them. Thanks again to Sharecare for their sponsorship of the Health:Further Consumer Summit. You can check them out, get expert health advice, find a doctor and manage your health at sharecare.com

Chris Chan is Innovation Imagineer at Mercer. He heads up a team that evaluates and invests in healthcare startups, working with healthcare entrepreneurs to get their solutions plugged into the healthcare industry. Chris as you’ll hear, is an interesting, very smart guy. In this conversation we talk a lot about finding innovation, finding good ideas and good teams that can build them. While it’s not anything that’ll look like a crash course in entrepreneurship - no way we can do that in 15 minutes - Chris offers a lot of insight into what corporate innovators and funds are looking for as they evaluate new ideas. Also, be sure to stick around for Chris’ thoughts on the current state of AI and machine learning.

Marquise Stillwell is Founder and Principal of Openbox, a design studio based in New York. If you caught our live podcast you already know Marquise. He and his team have some amazing work, that incorporate design thinking in healthcare. It’s not just building a new product, but entire systems that make for a better, healthier society. In this conversation you’ll hear a lot more about Openbox, what they do and how they think about design both in healthcare and in general. Two big things for Marquise, as you’ll hear: One, designing products and experiences that build trust with those using them. Two, it’s behavior change. Creating designs that promote behavior change. Not just collecting data, but using it to help promote behavior change. Doing things that will help us all make improvements for ourselves as individuals and for society as a whole.

Today we hear from a physician entrepreneur. Someone who saw a problem in healthcare during residency and built a solution to solve it. YiDing Yu is the co-founder of Twiage, which has a platform that coordinates care in real time between emergency responders, medical teams and hospitals. Twiage was one of 36 companies that participated in the Health:Further 2017 Pitch Competition, and they came away with the win. In the first half of the conversation we talk about Twiage and its platform. In the second half we talk about YiDing’s experience as a physician entrepreneur - what it’s looked like for her to build and lead a company with her co-founder, get a team together, and create a healthtech product that can have a significant impact on both individual patients and the health system as a whole.

Healthcare marketing isn't something we talk about a whole lot on the podcast. Some of us find it really interesting, others...not so much. But whatever your take is on healthcare marketing, it's just another name for "community engagement." And, in the world of health innovation, "community" is a collective term for "patients." So here we are - marketing as patient engagement. Tom Swanson is Head of Industry Strategy & Marketing in Healthcare at Adobe. He thinks a lot about how the tools Adobe builds can be used by healthcare companies to engage their customers - whether the customer is another company or a physician or an individual patient. The key, he says, is integrating systems so that marketing materials can be produced, distributed, measured and scaled very efficiently. Especially when dealing with a highly regulated industry like healthcare. The rewards for getting it right are significant. Tom points out that digital engagement in healthcare improves people's opinions of the medical services they receive, regardless of whether the service is actually better. Marketing and user experience? They really matter.