SeeThru Spotlight: Alex Cahana, MD, PhD (Patient 001)
Our first SeeThru spotlight features Dr. Alex Cahana, a healthcare and blockchain advisor to SeeThru and, also, one of its earliest adopters.
Alex Cahana’s background, training, and qualifications include a master’s degree in ethics and medical humanities, a medical degree from Tel Aviv University, completed fellowships in pain medicine and anesthesiology, 25+ years in academia and experience advising prominent healthcare leaders and entrepreneurs. Honestly, it’s hard to do justice to Dr. Cahana’s full breadth of experience and expertise. As he says, he’s “lived four lives in one and knows the dirty little secrets of each.”
After speaking with Dr. Cahana it’s obvious that he passionately and authentically weaves together his actions with his philosophical ideals. Drawing upon inspirations such as Edmund Husserl and Emmanuel Levinas (prominent phenomenologists and ethicists) an emerging thread becomes clear throughout Dr. Cahana’s work, the solutions to the problems we find in healthcare can be found by examining relationships. As Dr. Cahana says, “Every stakeholder has the potential to be a good stakeholder or a bad stakeholder.” Furthermore, Dr. Cahana identifies blockchain technology, such as that employed by SeeThru, as a “software solution to a social phenomenon of mistrust.”
When asked about advice for physicians fresh out of residency or medical school, Dr. Cahana said this, “Understand the why, not the how. We spend so much time worrying about just doing things right, we aren’t as concerned about doing the right thing. Why is it that [we] accept talking to patients for six minutes? Why do [we] accept twenty-five near misses and not try to solve it? We become part of the problem because we are complicit, because we don’t insist on doing the right thing.”
SeeThru is very proud to be working with Dr. Cahana. The partnerships we’re building with our providers are helping to introduce a paradigm shift in healthcare. As Dr. Cahana says, “We need to view things differently, we don’t need to just do things differently.”
