MIT’s H@cking Medicine – The Slides and What They Mean

A little while back, we did a post on the inaugural session of MIT’s H@cking Medicine.

Now H@cking Medicine will be on-going, but we set things off on the right foot by talking about how whatever cool new thing you might come up with has to solve real business problems.

Doesn’t matter if it’s a start-up or an established business trying to pivot to a new context or ecosystem (psst… like the one that’s current unfolding in health care as we speak).

Likewise doesn’t matter if you’re a payer accountable for performance and its profit or if you’re a vendor all about specific interventions and have an app or program for that — and of course all this is doubly true for any cool new data thing.

Well, here are the actual slides from that event.

They’re embedded in the post below, or you can click the link to jump to SlideShare.

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The post on this provides some commentary on the slides – but the basic idea is that technology isn’t cool for its own sake and health care and behavior change isn’t a design problem nor is general ‘disruption’ a measure of value.

Rather, value comes from the impact of solving a specific business problem in a meaningful way.

The context gives you all you need for your disruption: payment model changing in health care, data-driven profit mandated, technological barriers coming down and rendering legacy systems and their infrastructure largely absolutely – or at least requiring a major ‘re-packaging’ and marketing.

Now there’s some challenges, for sure.  One of which is that there’s a tremendous amount of noise in the market of folks re-wrapping old stuff for the new environment (subject for later).  But the good news is that the data will determine the winners and losers this time – if folks choose the wrong thing they’ll see it clearly in their profit.

Other challenge is that folks are scared, walking on egg shells trying not to make a mistake and waiting for thing to clear up.  But the good news is that this new world is zero sum, competition against you ‘peers’ – and if you snooze, you lose.  So the collective (in)-action problem that’s characterized previous potential changes won’t really apply in the same way.  Your competition goes up and you go down, and if you stay the ‘same’ you still loose over time (think GE firing the bottom 10% each year). (Again, a subject for later.)

Which takes us to the opportunity.  For folks starting out with a new intervention app or program, it means that you can potentially actually create and measure performance increases – clinical, or general member/patient good will.  It also means that your intervention might impact different types of performance, and generate real, measurable ROI in ways you haven’t yet thought of, but ways that will be clear and obvious, provided you now where and how to look.

Which takes us back to the challenges like H@cking Medicine and the young innovative companies participating.

If you’re starting out it’s a great time, but it means that you’ll have to figure it out for yourself, and then educate your clients on your value, using this type of data.

And if you’re interesting in learning more yourself, keep an eye on this BoatHouse thing.

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