My chat with Dr. Eric Topol

About a year ago, I reached out to Eric Topol to ask if we could have a 30 minute call to discuss SOAP’s product development. He said come back after your product has been validated. So after our recent validation study, I reached out again to share our incredible results. True to his word, he took the meeting.

For those of you who don’t the man, here is a brief on him from Wikipedia. Eric Jeffrey Topol (born 1954) is an American cardiologist, scientist, and author. He is the founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, a professor of Molecular Medicine at The Scripps Research Institute, and a senior consultant at the Division of Cardiovascular Diseases at Scripps Clinic in La Jolla, California. He is editor-in-chief of Medscape and theheart.org. He has published three bestseller books on the future of medicine. The Creative Destruction of Medicine (2010), The Patient Will See You Now (2015), and Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again (2019). He was also commissioned by the UK 2018–2019 to lead planning for the National Health Service's future workforce, integrating genomics, digital medicine, and artificial intelligence. In 2016, Topol was awarded a US$207 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to lead a significant part of the Precision Medicine Initiative (All of Us Research Program), a one million American prospective research program. This is in addition to his role as principal investigator for a US$35 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to promote innovation in medicine and the education and career training of future medical researchers.

When we spoke, I was particularly keen on asking Dr. Topol what he meant by a reference in his third book, Deep Medicine. The reference read, “AI is a powerful assistant to any open-minded, skillful physician.” The words “open-minded” stood out to me as an extreme caveat as to why physicians still appear reluctant to accept AI into their clinical workflows. A recent study underlines this resistance. In this particular study, radiologists were told that x-rays were read by an AI system, when in fact, they had been read by other radiologists. As a group, the radiologists rated advice as lower quality when it appeared to come from an AI system even though it actually came from their colleagues.

Back to Topol, so I asked him to define what he meant by an “open-minded” physician. He said that physicians were wary of hyperbole. Every digital health CEO claims that their product has been tried and tested and that physicians should adapt it to practice without further thought or caution. He said doctors are just not that gullible. To open the mind of a physician, products and applications need to be put through well-designed studies that show clear efficacy or efficiency improvements. And they better make them more money. As one physician leader said to me, don’t bother showing me a product that isn’t going to drop at least $100,000 more to my bottom line.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to depict doctors as mercenaries; rather, they are paid for their time, and time wasted is irretrievable. They all have routines that work well for them and to disrupt it, with innovation or otherwise, you better have something compelling. Dr. Topol is right. Show a physician something truly validated and compelling, something that serves their purposes well and effectively, and they will be as open-minded as the next person. Make them more money as well and that will really get the conversation going.

When it comes to selling to doctors there are simply no short-cuts. Open their minds with science not marketing and know your validated data well.