The future of healthcare
Erich Joachimsthaler Ph.D.
Founder & CEO of VIVALDI | Author | Professor | Focused on: brand strategy, platform business, new technology, innovation
Welcome back to Exponential Growth, where I’ll share my insights and ideas on brand strategy, platform business, new technology, innovation, and staying relevant in a digital world. For more information, check out my website.
If any industry is begging for an interaction field approach and the inherent shift of attention to the individual participant, it is healthcare. The industry is, at least theoretically, united around a common purpose: to promote health, to alleviate pain, to cure illness and avoid disease, and to prolong an insured person’s lifespan.?
The scope is massive.
This gargantuan industry depends on coordination among several fields, institutions, and entities of various kinds: health and life insurance agencies, hospitals and medical practices (including public universities), doctors and nurses, patients, specialists, policy makers, equipment and device makers, pharmaceutical companies, mental health providers, physical therapists, and others.?
“Reimagine the infrastructure of cancer care within a technology and science community that values integrity, inspires growth, and is uniquely positioned to create a more modern, connected oncology ecosystem.”
This is Flatiron Health’s mission, a company that seeks to create an interaction field to achieve a specific purpose: curing cancer. It is an ambitious goal, which the healthcare industry has been working toward for decades, perhaps since cancer was discovered near the end of the eighteenth century.?
According to the National Cancer Institute, “Approximately 39.5% of men and women will be diagnosed with cancer at some point during their lifetimes” and, “By 2040, the number of new cancer cases per year is expected to rise to 29.5 million and the number of cancer-related deaths to 16.4 million.” These numbers are scary, but keep in mind that there are many factors that contribute to your own personal risk of cancer. Take a look at the Mayo Clinic’s study, Cancer risk: What the numbers mean, for more information.
Unfortunately, the many players involved in the healthcare industry have traditionally engaged one another with little or no integration, working without being incorporated into a structured hierarchy with a common purpose.
Flatiron Health was established to bring the members of this disjointed ecosystem into an interaction field.?
According to Zach Weinberg, one of Flatiron’s cofounders, “We realized there was no easy solution to ensure that researchers and doctors were collaborating by learning from every patient’s experience with cancer… A lot of that data was siloed and difficult to access.”
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Flatiron sought to create something like a universal clinical trial—a system by which every cancer patient “participated” in research by having their data collected, aggregated, and analyzed alongside every other patient.?
Through Flatiron’s platform, which is powered by a trove of previously uncoordinated, uncaptured, and unanalyzed oncological data, participants engage directly with one another.
And patients aren’t the only participants. The National Cancer Institute is a partner, and fourteen of fifteen top life-science companies in oncology interact with Flatiron’s platform to access “research-grade data” to variously guide and develop their disparate organizational priorities. With this data, companies are able to make better choices about what products and services to develop. As participants engage and collaborate, a company may discover that its drug is more effective in combination with medications and therapies from other members of the ecosystem.
Additionally, Flatiron wouldn’t be nearly as effective in solving many challenges in the oncology interaction field if it weren’t for the proactive effort and influence of the market makers. These makers include various associations and societies such as the American Society of Clinical Oncology and the American Society of Hematology, as well as international agencies such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Access to Flatiron’s real-world evidence about what works and doesn’t work enables the FDA to make better, swifter decisions, which means that drugs may get quicker approval and come to market sooner than they would have in the old days. This research has shaved years off of the approval process, saving countless lives.?
This is the future.
It is not difficult to imagine how Flatiron, or a similarly purposed company, might expand. Why stop with cancer? As the Flatiron case study instructs, there is massive potential for companies to create interaction fields within the healthcare industry, if only by virtue of the volume of data alone. Synthesizing and aggregating this data in useful, productive, and beneficial ways—so that it can be shared, evaluated, contributed to, learned from, and leveraged by industries, organizations, and individuals—actuates velocity through an interaction field and can provide the kind of industry upheaval and revolution the healthcare field desperately needs.?
Want to learn more?
Check out my book, The Interaction Field: The Revolutionary New Way to Create Shared Value for Businesses, Customers, and Society.
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