Health Tech: Robert Rose On How MedWand Solutions’ Technology Can Make An Important Impact On Our Overall Wellness
An Interview With Dave Philistin
First is of course need. Millions of people all over the world have limited or no access to immediate, real-time healthcare, starting right here at home. Using the stroke example, we talked about earlier, imagine the social impact of saving 1.6 million lives every year and preventing the debilitating impact of stroke for millions more. It’s almost too much to measure in both human condition and financial impact on our global society.
In recent years, Big Tech has gotten a bad rep. But of course, many tech companies are doing important work making monumental positive changes to society, health, and the environment. To highlight these, we started a new interview series about “Technology Making An Important Positive Social Impact”. We are interviewing leaders of tech companies who are creating or have created a tech product that is helping to make a positive change in people’s lives or the environment. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Bob Rose, President and CEO of Nevada based MedWand Solutions Inc.
Before co-founding MedWand almost 8 years ago, Bob began his career in medical device manufacturing and then moved on to leadership positions in consumer electronics at NEC and Toshiba. He has led major business units for Fortune 500 companies like Tandy, CompUSA, Systemax, and Wyle as well as several successful start-ups. Bob has also served as a Command Pilot and Hospital & Outreach Coordinator for Angel Flight West.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory and how you grew up?
I grew up in Maryland. My father was a journalist and my mother a clinical social worker who ran the long-term care center at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. I also have a special needs sister, so I guess you could say I grew up in both a challenging and intellectually stimulating environment. I was exposed to some of the challenges in healthcare delivery and services at an early age. I went to the University of Maryland originally studying political science with the goal of becoming a lawyer, but a part time job at an electronics company changed my focus and I shifted to Electronic Engineering, which re-directed my life to focus on tech of all kinds.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
It was a surprise promotion in 1995 that changed the path I was on forever. I had just left a job in a very cool little tech company in South Florida after we had been sold; I took a big pay cut and moved to Atlanta to take over a service center operation in a new Computer City store for Tandy Corp. The Weather Channel headquarters were nearby, and they started asking us to build them some custom computers. That launched a build-to-order computer initiative for multiple stores and customers in the area and drove our revenue over 10x inside of 6 months. One day the Executive VP of Tandy Retail Services walked in unannounced, took me to lunch, and told me I was now the Division General Manager of the revived Tandy computer business now to be a major build-to-order operation known as Tandy System’s integration. Keep in mind this was when Dell was rocketing upward under a similar direct to consumer model, so it was the right place at the right time. I was given a large empty factory near Fort Worth, and an initial customer base of 100 Computer City stores, 1500 Radio Shack franchise stores, and the Incredible Universe chain. I scooped up the key people on my team in Atlanta, two of who are still with me, moved to Texas and grew it to over thirty million in revenue inside of a year before we were sold to CompUSA and became CompUSA PC, which was even more successful under a similar model.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
We all have our mentors, but rather than one particular person it has been an amazing team of smart, talented people that have helped me along the way. Over the past 40 years I’ve had 14 jobs. Four were start-ups of which three succeeded and one failed, some were turn-arounds, three I left for other opportunities and seven were sold resulting in a change for me. I was also fired twice. Sometimes just my title or business card changed and sometimes it caused an entirely new direction, but for the past 26 years I have always managed to fall uphill, and along the way up until this very day at MedWand, I have assembled a core team of people who have been critical to my success and to whom I am grateful to every day. MedWand’s CTO has been with me on and off for 26 years across 9 different companies, and there are others with us nearly as long too, plus some fresh new talent who have only recently joined the adventure. Make it fun, make it challenging, make it rewarding, and the right team can accomplish amazing things.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
Let’s start with “If you stop, they will catch you”. I can attribute that one to a boss I had 40 years ago who is a good friend to this day. We live in fast paced world that is constantly throwing us curve balls. At the same time, there is always someone who will attempt to leapfrog or duplicate our technology or take our market position. The best way to not be overtaken is to constantly push the envelope. The analog to this was from Abraham Lincoln: “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” I just never stop. I must add one more from another great mentor and friend who recently passed away. He had advanced degrees in English Literature and attributed this one correctly to Charles Marion Russell: “Meat ain’t meat till it’s in the pan”. That painting and quote hangs on my office wall and is appropriate at every phase of invention, development, sales, deployment, and operations.
You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
The first is to be a good listener. If you take the time to listen to the people involved with your operations at every level, it goes a long way in helping make the right decisions. I ran a factory that had over 1100 employees. Once a week I did a “lunch with the boss” where I would bring a dozen or so hourly employees from a different department into the conference room for lunch and a confidential informal talk without any supervisors present. Once they realized they could speak freely, it was amazing the things I learned and where I was able to improve our operations as a result.
Next is to never stop learning. I was an early adopter of Six Sigma and lean before it was a thing much outside of what Jack Welsh had achieved at GE. Instead of just being an executive sponsor I went through the entire ASQ Black Belt program and learned as much as possible. It has made a huge difference in the success of my operations ever since. I took over leadership of a $300 million business unit that was losing $7 million per month, and had $150 million in inventory in a business where inventory had the shelf life of fish. In no small part thanks to an aggressive Six Sigma implementation and educational program for everyone, we turned the business back to profitability and reduced the inventory to under $8 million, all in only 21 months. Along the way we achieved world class quality, reduced headcount, and increased productivity.
The third is integrity. I’m a hand-shake guy and I prefer to do business with people who are honest and as open as possible. If you treat people properly and with respect, both personally and in business, you find that you can usually sleep at night. I kind of look at things like contracts and NDAs as divorce agreements, or at least pre-nups. Yes, I know they are necessary and set baselines for expectations and performance, but why bother engaging in any meaningful partnership if we can’t trust each other to begin with? There are people in my life who I have been doing business with for over 30 years. That doesn’t happen by accident and can’t be maintained with duplicity and insincerity. If it’s a choice between integrity and profits I’ll take integrity every time, which usually works out for the best anyway.
Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about the tech tools that you are helping to create that can make a positive impact on our wellness. To begin, which particular problems are you aiming to solve?
It may sound Quixotic, but the short answer to that question is health equity. That’s a big dragon to try to slay, but so many people in the world have limited or no access to quality healthcare, or in many cases any healthcare at all. Telemedicine was a first step in correcting this for some, but it hasn’t changed much since the first phone call was made by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876. We may have added video chat thanks to Zoom but it’s still all “Tele” and no “Medicine”. MedWand was created to enable a doctor or healthcare professional to actually examine a patient in real time over the internet with a whole lot more than just a web cam.
How do you think your technology can address this?
The MedWand ecosystem places the same sensors a doctor would use in his or her office to examine a patient, at the patient’s location, either in the patients’ hands or the hands of a home healthcare worker or nurse and gives the remotely located healthcare provider the ability to observe, manipulate, record, and notate results real-time, with seamless integration into any Health Records or Practice Management system. This includes the Pulse Oximeter, Non-contact thermometer, EKG, digital stethoscope, and Ultra High-definition camera that has attachments for examination of the ears, skin, and throat. We can also ingest data from a Blood pressure cuff, spirometer, glucometer, weight scale and other Bluetooth devices. Our cloud technology then enables the seamless application of multiple layers of FDA approved AI engines to assist in anomaly detection of all kinds, already including many different arrythmias and murmurs. It’s like a 21st century house call, only better.
Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about this cause?
For me, as a command pilot for Angel Flight, I have flown countless mission here in the U.S. where people could not get access to healthcare. Imagine recovering from some acute care event like cancer or surgery or a stroke or heart attack and living literally hundreds of miles from your point of care for follow-up and wellness checks. Sixty million Americans live more than a 30-minute drive from the nearest healthcare facility and a good portion of them much further than that. We have always said that Angel Flight would gladly go out of business if there were some way to overcome that. Well, we think MedWand will be at least a partial answer to this problem. We can bring a virtual doctor literally anywhere on earth from anywhere else on earth and give him or her an entire suite of tools to help make a reasonable assessment of a patient’s health.
How do you think this might change the world?
Let’s start by saving lives. As just a single example, nearly 14 million people in the world will have a stroke over the next 12 months. 60% of those will be first time victims too. 20% of strokes are caused by undetected AFIB, which can be treated. A simple one-minute MedWand exam using our ECG and being processed through our FDA approved cloud-based AI engine that detects 8 of the 12 detectable arrythmias can detect AFIB. If everyone had a MedWand ECG screening every few months, we could save millions of lives, and that’s just one example, there are many more. Using a MedWand, a remote doctor can usually tell if a patient is having a heart attack or something less severe and avoid the huge expense of diverting a ship or an aircraft. We imagine a better world and a brighter future if we can start moving toward health equity and technologies like ours are made accessible.
Keeping “Black Mirror” and the “Law of Unintended Consequences” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?
Yes, particularly in the healthcare space as we have more and more wearables, more sophisticated and capable devices like MedWand, and more Artificial Intelligence proliferating that is processing healthcare data. We need to avoid self-diagnosis and particularly self-treatment driven by machines. At MedWand we don’t like the term Artificial Intelligence when we talk about AI. We think of it more as an “Anomaly Indicator” that can alert a doctor, or a lower-level extender like a home health worker or school nurse that something has been indicated that requires further examination and assessment. Someday AI may reach the level of the holographic doctor on Star Trek, but for the immediate future, while we can help with remote tools for a doctor to use, there is no substitute for live medical training, experience, and human intuition.
Here is the main question for our discussion. Based on your experience and success, can you please share “Five things you need to know to successfully create technology that can make a positive social impact”? (Please share a story or an example, for each.)
First is of course need. Millions of people all over the world have limited or no access to immediate, real-time healthcare, starting right here at home. Using the stroke example, we talked about earlier, imagine the social impact of saving 1.6 million lives every year and preventing the debilitating impact of stroke for millions more. It’s almost too much to measure in both human condition and financial impact on our global society.
Now that we have defined the problem, let’s look at what technology exists today and why it isn’t filling the need. In our case telemedicine calls, with or without video, gives the doctor very limited ability to make a meaningful remote diagnosis. Yet the tools to do that in person have existed for a very long time in their own offices. The challenge here was to link the tools to the doctor when they were not in the same room as the patient.
Third, look at what other adjacent technologies exist that could combine with yours to create an even broader total value-added solution. An example here for us would be integrating software-as-a-device FDA approved AI engines into our ecosystem, since we are already collecting the vitals data those engines need. Why not enhance the value and deliver a higher level of diagnostic capabilities upstream while still in a remote environment?
Listen to your customer! MedWand was created by doctors and engineers, but we also have done extensive human factors testing too. Look at what works and what doesn’t work. If there is something even remotely similar out there learn from them. In our case, we have seen attempts to drive devices like MedWand from the patient up, through over the counter sales attempts, with very limited impact on anything. If you want to have a significant positive social impact, you cannot focus on one vertical like the wealthy worried well, you need to figure out how to get your technology into the hands of the people that actually need it and make it affordable too.
Last is don’t be afraid to pivot and be aware of what’s happening around you while you create. We conceived of MedWand almost eight years ago. At that time, the technology to add features like an ECG that could be used by a remote patient without a doctor present and streamed live over the internet didn’t even exist. No one had any idea that we would experience a pandemic that would change the world either. Covid propelled Telemedicine years into the future in only a few months but did nothing for heath equity and in fact made it worse by absorbing resources. I think if you want to create technology to foster positive social change you need to look for the perfect storm where technology, need and public awareness intersect.
If you could tell other young people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?
I hardly qualify as a young person, at least chronologically, but that gives me an advantage in answering this question. I’ve done a lot of things and made a lot of products over the years, but this makes me think back to our days doing build-to-order computers. When things went wrong, we would keep perspective by remembering that “hey, we are only building computers”. It seemed OK at the time. There are lots of jobs that can keep us occupied and our families fed, and our needs met, but this journey with MedWand has changed all of that for me. I am frustrated with every day we wait for FDA approval or get told we may not be able to get enough parts to build enough product to meet demand. Why? Because what we have built is so important and so needed and will help HealthCare professionals extend their reach and save lives every day. But that’s the same reason that I now get up energized every day and look forward to what we can and will do next to build on what we have done so far. We are on the verge of changing the world of remote healthcare and it’s exciting. I also see how infectious that excitement is on our younger staff. The millennials at MedWand, and there are many, are both inspired and inspiring. Today’s young people face a world of growing monumental challenges that are threatening our very lives in ways that we have never seen before. They NEED to make a difference both for themselves and for the future of our planet and society. I do have to add though that from what I have seen of this up-and-coming generation of leaders is that we are in very good hands. Because we now live in a world powered by instant access to everything, they are more thoughtful, more fair, and more aware than any generation that has come before. It a great place to start to make a difference.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. :-)
Absolutely. I want 30-minutes with Elon Musk. He understands what it’s like to dream big dreams and make them become reality. I have a very specific message for him. Starlink is providing broadband access to the entire world, and fast too. Between MedWand and Starlink we can bring doctors to everyone on earth regardless of geographic location. Imagine: A MedWand remote system with a pulse oximeter, 4K camera for specialty examinations, thermometer, ECG, stethoscope, BP Cuff, spirometer, glucometer, weight scale, and expandable to include fluoroscopy for wound care and ultrasound and more connected to any doctor anywhere in the world through the Starlink system. We can put it in, say, a remote village in the middle of West Nowhere, and cover 500 people for less than seventy cents per person per month, all in! Kind of a mic drop moment. So come on Mr. Musk, let’s combine our technologies and change the world even more than we could do on our own.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
MedWand’s web site is www.medwand.com
We have a linked-in page here: https://www.linkedin.com/company/medwand-solutions
My personal Linked-in page is here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-rose-549b926/
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Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success in your important work.
Thank you for allowing me to share our vision.
