Who and Why?
Alright — so why should you read this blog? Honestly — you shouldn’t. This is just a start — a rough draft. This is someone sketching. Come back in 2 years when this is more fully fleshed out. I should note I’m an MBA student at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business and will be graduating in 2 years (coincidence?), so this is meant to help both you and I learn together. So I guess I take it back — if you read this and find value then I am all the happier for it, and you should let me know. Otherwise, cut me some slack for now. This “Why” isn’t for you (yet).
In some circles, Georgetown may be most well-known for being the B-school most closely associated with the cross-roads of business and government, so “Why,” you might ask, “isn’t this guy taking up this problem and his ideas to government?” Well, I very well may… in 25 years when the government itself takes up this problem with more vigor. But until then, I believe strongly that it will be the entrepreneur and established tech companies that will largely drive change in this field (I loathe calling healthcare an “industry” — sounds like we should be producing widgets instead of saving lives) and drive it quickly and thoroughly.
As for my professionally historical context, I started my career in healthcare in laboratory diagnostics (and before that, selling industrial maintenance, repair, and operational supplies at a company called W.W. Grainger). With COVID being the biggest news story in the history of social media, there has been a pretty considerable light shone on the laboratory diagnostic scene, which, until now, has gone otherwise quite under the radar. I will talk extensively about my thoughts of the diagnostic field later but just know… it’s a field ripe for resowing.
After diagnostics, I went to the other side of the proverbial table and recruited private-practice, independent physicians into a national medical group. There I had the bliss of seeing the unholy mess of the larger healthcare system: the interactions and conflicting interests between patient, provider, and payer at levels from the hyper-local (“Fax machines are still a thing???”) to the macro (“Wait, the insurance company actually expects to be overcharged?”).
From there, I decided I needed to see first-hand the “bleeding-edge” of healthtech: the all-encompassing and much-hyped AI. Turns out, it is not nearly as complicated as one would think (though I will not even pretend to understand much of the work our Data Scientists do at this point — though I will learn!), nor is it just one thing. Like diagnostics, I have many opinions and thoughts about this technology and where it is going, but I will address those in later sequences. For now, the swirl of AI, healthcare, and privacy/security that I find myself is a suitable crucible to learn what is really pushing the limits of our currently limited system.
Going forward, I’ll examine how these experiences have shaped my understanding of the healthcare field, what technologies exist and how they are shaping the field, and how I would anticipate future evolutions to unfold.
