The KHIT Blog: Project Zygote shout-out

Tuesday, December 20, 2016

Project Zygote shout-out

A very interesting initiative,

"Many early stage founders and technologists with healthcare ideas want to contribute to the field’s disruptive innovation but lack domain expertise.

"Likewise, many healthcare providers want to enter into the digital health field but lack the technology know-how make the shift.

"Project Zygote brings these two groups together, plus go-to-market professionals, to form teams that develop, vet, and validate new digital health solutions.

"As an idea conceived and run by members of the Health 2.0 San Francisco Chapter, we are leveraging local talent to ensure the next wave of digital health products holistically solve meaningful healthcare problems. Our goal is to broker relationships, educate participants, and vet new concepts. Ultimately, we nurture teams to the point where they are ready to credibly approach healthcare accelerators and investors to take flight."
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I just reached out to the Health 2.0 SF group, and a link to the above stuff quickly showed in in my LinkedIn email feed. I'll be watching and reporting on developments with great interest.

apropos of the foregoing:

What Is Causing Startups to Go Bankrupt?
Shellye Archambeau
December 20th, 2016

Many startups have a great product that’s viable, marketable, and ripe with potential. But if that was the only indicator of success, then nine out of 10 startups wouldn’t fail. The annals of startup history wouldn’t be littered with instances of companies like Friendster or Color that had fantastic products, but eventually sank.

The truth is that startups often go bankrupt for reasons that extend beyond the viability of their products. Many of them fall prey to missteps that ultimately dry up their cash flow, and cause the company to fold. So what are some of these pitfalls to avoid?...

Good article. I would also commend to you again my citation of Steve Tobak's highly relevant new book, cited in a recent post.

...Given all the hype, we should be seeing the mother of all business creation movements, but we’re not. What we are seeing is a massive long-term decline in new startups and small businesses across all demographics and geographies. We’ll get into this in more detail later, but for now, suffice to say that new business creation has dropped a whopping 28 percent from 1977 to 2011, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. The greatest irony of all is that the steepest declines are coming from those aged 20 to 34, who created just 22 percent of all new companies in 2013, down from 34 percent in 1996. That’s right. The entrepreneurial generation is nothing of the kind. It’s just a media fabrication. (Not to mention that unemployment and underemployment rates among Millennials are almost twice that of the general population.)

With new business creation and workforce participation rates at multidecade lows across the board— especially among young people— the truth is inescapable: Instead of enabling and empowering a new generation of successful innovators and business leaders, this mythical movement and all the virtual content it generates is leading countless would-be entrepreneurs down a utopian path toward a dream that simply doesn’t exist.

Why all the gloom and doom? For starters, you can’t fix a problem until you identify it...

Nobody ever changed the world by doing what everyone else is doing. That’s not just common sense— it’s biology. Species evolve when beneficial genetic mutations arise out of competitive ecosystems and take over. Likewise, civilization advances when unique individuals who think and act differently shatter the status quo and forever change how we do things. Leaders lead. Followers follow. You can’t be both. Real leaders don’t follow, and neither do real entrepreneurs...

Tobak, Steve (2015-10-19). Real Leaders Don't Follow: Being Extraordinary in the Age of the Entrepreneur (Kindle Locations 550-575). Entrepreneur Press. Kindle Edition.

I'd like to see Steve present to Project Zygote participants. Really enjoyed and learned from his book. He should also be on a WinterTech Panel.

Also pertinent, my Sept. 2015 post, What exactly is "Leadership," anyway? And, go all the way back to 2012 and my thoughts on "Effectuation."

Then there's my April 2016 post On Disruption: "OMG! Awesome!! Dan Lyons for President!!!
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More to come...

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Brave New Health

Commonwell Health Alliance

Another important read (pdf)

I love this kind of stuff. It sustains and humbles me. "As politicians, advertisers, salesmen, and propagandists for various political, economic, moral, religious, psychic, environmental, dietary, and artistic doctrinaire positions know only too well, fallible human minds are easily tricked, by clever verbiage... Common language—or at least, the English language—has an almost universal tendency to disguise epistemological statements by putting them into a grammatical form which suggests to the unwary an ontological statement. A major source of error in current probability theory arises from an unthinking failure to perceive this."

Quotes

"An economist is a person who sees something that works in practice and tries to figure out whether it will work in theory."

- J.D. Kleinke, medical economist
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"The only person who enjoys change is a baby with a wet diaper."

"Every misspent dollar in our health care system is part of somebody's paycheck.

- Brent James, M.D., M.Stat

“We could do healthcare, at markedly higher quality, for everyone in this country, without rationing or denying anybody the care that they need, without having the government dictate how doctors practice or whether hospitals could expand, at half the cost we do it now.”

- Health Care Futurist Joe Flower

Most of the sciences, unlike parts of medical science, are not concerned with the impossible. There is not complementary and alternative physics, or chemistry, or biochemistry, or engineering. These disciplines compare their ideas against reality, and, if the ideas are found wanting, abandoned."

- Mark A. Crislip, MD

"Q: How much alcohol is too much?
A: More than your doctor drinks."

- a physician I once heard speak during a CME presentation

“Just because science doesn’t know everything, doesn’t mean you get to fill in the gaps with whatever fairy tale most appeals to you.”

- Dara O’Briain

'[I]t is one small step from using the computer for "helping" doctors to monitoring them, judging them, dictating to them what to do, and withdrawing payment for computer non-compliance. The use of computer data is a multi-edged sword. It can be used for the "good," facilitating diagnosis and treatment and making it more accurate and up-to-date, and for “evil,” invading privacy, inviting security breechs, and making decisions based on the opinions of remote authorities rather than those present at the patient-doctor encounter.'

- Richard Reece, MD

“[T]here ARE statistics which are non-political. Just because The Washington Post/Fox News reports the temperature is 75 degrees doesn’t mean it’s really snowing and sunscreen is a liberal/conservative plot. Even if you earn a living being ideological.”

- Michael L. Millenson

"It is a generally a fairly convincing argument that people shouldn’t have to be subsidized to undertake a change which is in their best interest.

The reconciliation seems to be that EHR is not supposed to make a doctor’s practice more efficient and higher quality. It is supposed to make the system of care more efficient and higher quality, which is not the same thing. Those of you who took calc recall that maximizing the total of variables is not achieved by maximizing any one variable and this is a perfect example of that.

Those of you have served in combat certainly noticed that too — if everyone works as a team the unit takes fewer casualties. If you try to save your own hide, you might, but at the expense of more casualties overall."

- Al Lewis

"There are two ideas to keep in mind about Bayesian reasoning and how we tend to mess it up. The first is that base rates matter, even in the presence of evidence about the case at hand. This is often not intuitively obvious. The second is that intuitive impressions of the diagnosticity of evidence are often exaggerated."

- Daniel Kahneman, "Thinking, Fast and Slow"

"Physicians apply advanced scientific knowledge, but they must do so without the favorable conditions that experimental scientists create for themselves. Multitasking is forced on physicians, often in chaotic environments and under severe time and resource constraints."

- Lawrence and Lincoln Weed, "Medicine in Denial"

"It’s time to stop the whining about Obama care and acknowledge we already have universal health care. We just pay for it in the stupidest way possible that ensures problems are that much more disastrous and complicated when they’re finally treated."

- Mark Hoofnagle, MD, PhD

"Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily."

- Thomas Szasz, MD
___

"Of course, one reason that process metrics* are so popular is that processes are much easier to define and measure than outcomes."

- The Skeptical Scalpel
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"There is an “illusion of validity” for any random data point, a seductive sense that is colored by what we hope will be true. Mountains of pharmaceutical claims are often made from mere molehills of data."

- Danielle Ofri, MD
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"Joy empowers people. It is a source of energy that enables people to hope and plan and change their lives for the better. Spend some time around someone who is relentlessly negative and how do you feel–drained, right? More and more research shows that joy is not something that just happens to you, like a bolt of lightening out of the blue. Joy is, instead, a habit to cultivate. Negative thinking and despair are the crabgrass of our souls–weeds that take root and spread, sometimes to all areas of life. Joy, in contrast, is a soul’s rose–hardy when cared for, able to put down roots over time and withstand disease and extremes. Like a rose, however, your joy can become blighted from neglect or harsh conditions. We all need to tend to our joy–to prune away the badness, and to know that, even though it may look like a prickly bare root, if you invest time in a joyous outlook, gorgeous things will bloom, even in the harshest conditions."

- Dr. Jan Gurley
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"'Solutions' exist only in mathematics."

- Karen Martin
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"The issue of how to regulate clinical software is, in the long run, indistinguishable from the issue of how to regulate medicine. The only difference is that medicine is practiced in the open, without secrecy, subject to peer review, and under a merit-based state license."

- Adrian Gropper, MD
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"Economist, rope, tree: some assembly required."

- Source unknown

DISCLAIMER:

I write this blog wholly on my own time and my own dime. The views proffered are expressly my own as a concerned and active citizen/taxpayer (in addition to being the result of my substantive experience in the various IT fields), and in no way reflect any policy views of my former employer, notwithstanding that some of the thinking has indeed obviously been spurred by the implications of the work with which I have been doing for them.

FAIR USE POLICY
I cite a ton of news and web sources spanning the breadth of relevant technical and policy domains, sometimes at substantial length. I believe I remain well within the bounds of "Fair Use," as [1] I am not doing any of this for profit, [2] I always provide attribution and links -- which, [3] far from negatively impacting any copyright holders' commercial interests, might actually increase traffic to and interest in their offerings.

Nonetheless, should I post anything of yours regarding which you have any objection, just let me know and I will remove it forthwith.

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Tuesday, December 20, 2016

Project Zygote shout-out

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