Tag Archive for: medicine

It’s not often that a speaker at an event shares live feed of their EKG. But then, the VLAB panel discussion titled “The Future of Diagnostics: Consumer Driven Medicine” was not an ordinary look at the field of medicine. The event–which was held at the Munger Center of the Paul Brest Hall of Stanford Law School–took place on Thursday, April 16th 2013.As part of illustrating emerging technologies in mobile health, moderator Dr. Kraft pulled up an app he regularly uses which tracks key health indicators. From his iPhone to the big screen, he shared real-time data such as heart rate and EKG.

Consumer driven diagnostics: emerging and disruptive

The event was a fascinating look into the possibility and scope that emerging technologies such as mobile phone apps, bluetooth technology, and mobile scanning have altered the way we track and understand our health. The burgeoning field of consumer driven medicine has already grounded costs of once-expensive processes such as DNA sequencing. As you may note from the NIH graph, the cost of sequencing a human genome used to be upwards of $10K in the early 2000’s, today costs a fraction of that sticker price. Industry leaders, such as Dr. Kraft, cited predictions that the cost of sequencing a human genome will one day cost in the range of $100-200.

The multi-level disruption of healthcare and diagnostics was the focus of this panel. It featured the following speakers:

Moderator, Daniel Kraft, M.D., Executive Director, FutureMed, Faculty Chair of Medicine, Singularity University
Panelist, Walter De Brouwer, CEO of SCANADUPanelist, Dr. David Albert, Founder and Chief Medical Officer at AliveCorPanelist, Anne DeGheest, HealthTech Capital, Managing Director and Founder

 

Watch the video

View the entire panel discussion in the following video:

 

What social entrepreneurs should consider

One aspect of consumer driven diagnostics is the technology + medicine aspect. i.e. How do you code for diagnostic medicine? A select sector of the entrepreneurial and social entrepreneurial communities will focus on this side of the rubics cube. This means understanding the science, the web development, and compliance landscape (i.e. “HIPAA”, etc.) of developing medicine-related technology.

However, there is another incredibly vital angle that will require impact innovation attention. It is the distribution, scaling, and effective analysis of crowdsourced medical data. Consumer driven diagnostics is as much a data problem as well as a medical-technology problem. If you aren’t building the consumer-facing software, you might consider creating efficient processes by which data collection becomes scalable, increasing amounts of data are accurately analyzed, and methods are developed for keeping this potentially-impactful data secure and private.

If you step back from the niche area of medicine + technology you arrive to a broader place of making sense of, efficiently using, and securely tracking big data. That is a problem that could benefit from the nuanced, triple-bottom line mindset of a social innovator.

Photos from the event

networking hour before fo