A Brief History of my Digital Health Group

With the Digital Health group on LinkedIn closing in on 74,000 members— and nearly 18,000 of my connections being members — I feel inspired to share a brief history of how the group came into being. For those interested, I also cover this in my book, "The Fourth Wave: Digital Health", in more detail.

In 2009, shortly after departing Motorola, I happened to view a keynote by Donald Jones on YouTube. In his talk, and despite the barely audible sound, it was clear to me that what he was talking about — the convergence of wireless technologies with health and healthcare — was of incredible significance. With my background in project and program management, I felt that I might help move things forward in a small way by informing others about what was happening. Since I was on LinkedIn, it seemed natural to create a group there, which I named "Wireless Health San Diego". However, after a few short weeks, as people from around the world began joining the group, it seemed like a good idea to remove "San Diego" from the name, and simply call it "Wireless Health".

Fast forward a couple of years to late-2011 and, to my surprise, with the group growing in size to the thousands, Eric Topol, MD published his book, "The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care". While the book was fantastic, the revelation to me was contained in the title: The digital revolution, i.e. digital technology, was changing health and healthcare. It wasn't just wireless technology. Moreover, all of the terms being used to describe what was happening in health and healthcare were essentially digital technologies being applied in different ways. They were fundamentally the same in terms of the enabling technology: digital.

At that point, I decided that I should rename my group to Digital Health. At the time, it was a disused term, and none of the players who've come to be associated with it were using it. I announced the change to the group name and began promulgating the term globally in the group and on Twitter, using the hashtag #DigitalHealth. Despite a lot of pushback, the term eventually caught on, as we now see it being used everywhere.

While I didn't coin the term, I was the first to insist it be used as an umbrella for what we're seeing, and I was the first to say that genomics should be part of the definition. This ultimately led to my writing my book.