Health Tech: Wayne Brinster On How PreciseDx Technology Can Make An Important Impact On Our Overall Wellness

An Interview With Dave Philistin

Be a good and attentive listener — Never let yourself think or act like you are the smartest person in the room — you may be, but it doesn’t matter, and listening to all sincere ideas provides great information and allows you to understand what your people are thinking about. You must give balance here. Listening to someone’s perspective on the business is important, but I have had to end conversations if someone starts to cover the same information again.

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 Wayne Brinster.

Wayne Brinster is Chief Executive Officer of PreciseDx, and is a recognized, successful serial CEO. Prior to joining PreciseDx in 2021, Wayne was President and CEO of MedTest, where he orchestrated a complete business reorganization to align with a more strategic, market-focused vision and growth strategy. He is a strategic executive leader with 19+ years of driving revenue and promoting transformation within Diagnostics, Life Science and Biotech industry. Throughout his career as a vision-driven, goal-focused executive he has built a solid track record of improving processes and procedures, balancing focus across business development, maximizing revenues and returns, harnessing team strengths, and building consensus among executives and stakeholders.

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 a small town with two older brothers and we lived adjacent to a small machine shop that my father operated. I feel I was heavily influenced by seeing the entrepreneurial thinking process where work success becomes the motivation and the reward. I was exposed daily to the idea of applying new and better technology to a current or even historical problem to improve efficiency as well as the quality of the outcome.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?

Several years ago, while traveling in Asia, I visited a very large women’s hospital seeing over a thousand women queued up waiting to be tested. The stress on their faces as they waited to see if their symptoms were actually caused by cancer, and the emotions when they found out, was extremely impactful to me. Thinking about the sheer numbers made me realize the magnitude of lives that could be improved through technological improvement.

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?

I like this question because my career spans three decades and one thing that I have learned is that asking for and giving help is central to success. I have been very fortunate that many people have helped my career, and luckily, I listened to most of them, had a good enough memory to quickly see when the others were right and made timely course-correction. The one I would call out in specifics is the time that a senior executive decided to establish several small entrepreneurial businesses within a multibillion dollar company and I was fortunate enough to be put in charge of one. It was a bit of sink or swim and he reminded me of “putting the right people in the right seats” and that has stuck with me ever since.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

The life lesson quote that I think about often is “A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.” from Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
I use this as a motivator to try to tackle new experiences and challenge myself to do things I have not done previously. The same quote has become a guiding principle in assigning developmental assignments to people that work for me.

I also have several others that I like to remember:

• “Motivation is the art of getting people to do what you want them to do because they want to do it.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower
• “Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.” — Stephen Hawking
• “Leaders can let you fail and yet not let you be a failure.” — Stanley McChrystal

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?

1. Never stop talking to customers — No matter the company size or where you are in your product’s lifecycle, understanding what your customer likes and dislikes about your product and your competition can give you great information. For example, I was once told that sending our products out as kits was an inconvenience because the sampling part went to the collection area and the other supplies went to the analytical lab so they unpacked the kits and repacked parts. Once we changed, not only were our customers happier but we leveraged that little difference to take significant market share from competition

2. Be a good and attentive listener — Never let yourself think or act like you are the smartest person in the room — you may be, but it doesn’t matter, and listening to all sincere ideas provides great information and allows you to understand what your people are thinking about. You must give balance here. Listening to someone’s perspective on the business is important, but I have had to end conversations if someone starts to cover the same information again.

3. Over Communicate to All the staff — It is easy, especially as organizations grow, to have people become out-of-touch with the mission, goals and strategy. This leads to inefficiency; if people don’t? know exactly where the company is going and what the goals are, they can’t put all their efforts into getting there.

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?

Clinical practitioners often struggle to determine the exact course of treatment to recommend to their cancer patients — undertreating and overtreating are equally problematic. When someone is diagnosed with cancer, both the patient and the care team need to understand as much as possible about their individual cancer. Pathologists do a great job in finding characteristics from the tumor tissue, however they will greatly benefit from the quantitative accuracy provided by the PreciseDx system.

How do you think your technology can address this?

The PreciseDx diagnostic tests are built to leverage the power of artificial intelligence to scan the entire slide and determine quantitative based assessment to give the care team additional information to make the best decisions about treatment. An additional benefit is we are currently speaking with Pharmaceutical companies to apply our technology to better understand and quantify the performance of their compounds.

Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about this cause?

I have been involved in cancer diagnostics since the nineties. I find it to be intrinsically motivational to empower care teams with the ability to diagnose specifics of the cancer accurately and precisely. Predicting outcome and helping to determine treatment is addressing one of the most difficult, yet rewarding, areas in diagnostics, but one with potentially life-changing impact for patients.

How do you think this might change the world?

Applying Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to cancer diagnostics are designed to have a significant impact on survival rate and quality of life for cancer patients.

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?

We don’t perceive any negatives to speak of, but we believe our tests will give the care team as well as the patient additional information with more options to be considered.

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.)

o Understand the need — The more clearly you understand the need, the more you can design the technology to meet that need and delight your customer. At PreciseDx, we have a number of staff that worked in our target market previously, so they are familiar with the needs.

o Have a clear value proposition — Determining what you will tell your prospective customers about your product and making sure it is compelling enough for them to switch from what they are doing now to your product. We test our value prop often with actual customers and ask ourselves “are we achieving our performance specifications?”

o Make sure it is actionable — A key question is “what will the customer do differently as a result of what you are providing?” In our case, we intend to give them information that will influence what the care team will use to help patients battle their cancer.

o Design it to work within the standard of care — We all have processes and procedures. We find that the best technologies are those that improve these procedures and preserve the methods that have become standards because they work well. As a result of the work referred to above, we have designed our tests to fit directly into the care process, eliminating any potential delays or disruptions.

o Make it available to as broad a market as possible — This may seem obvious, but you need to think about things like support of the technology as you design and innovate. We feel strongly that we will benefit from the fact that our test is designed to be done from an image. This means that regardless of physical locations, the scans can be transmitted to us and we can quickly turn the results around.

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?

It is a matter of self-fulfillment. Working at a job with purpose is not always easy or fun, but when you look back at what you have achieved, you have something tangible to think about. Daniel H. Pink referred to this as “intrinsic motivation”: the drive to do something because it is interesting, challenging, and absorbing — is essential for high levels of creativity.

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. :-)

Elon Musk. I think I am an out-of-the-box thinker, but Musk is truly a boundarylessness thinker.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

Authority Magazine’s readers can further follow PreciseDx on our website https://precisedx.ai / and our LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/precisedx/

Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success in your important work.