Faces of Digital Health

Despite enjoying clinical practice, Benedict Evans still came to a point where he felt he is not passionate enough about what he does, and as a surgeon, he realized he enjoys talking to patients more than treating them when they are under anesthesia. He went to a consulting position at McKinsey, then back to an NHS Trust to drive digital innovation and now to a VC position.  Resources: InHealth Ventures: https://www.inhealth.vc/ Episode recap: https://www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/blog/f093-how-does-a-doctor-become-a-vc-benedict-evans

Leah Houston is an Emergency Physician who has been following blockchain development since 2012 and now designed a solution that would empower doctors, make their credentialing easier which would simplify transitions from one hospital to the next one if one wished to switch jobs.    HPEC is restoring agency and autonomy to the physician-patient relationship with self-sovereign (physician-owned and controlled) digital identities and verifiable credentials. The key thing is that the solution is returning autonomy to physicians and eliminates third party interference from the doctor-patient relationship.    In this discussion, you will be able to hear how credentialing works in the US, what are the powerful forces that are hurting healthcare, and why doctors and patients should regain control over their communication and treatment choices.   Episode recap: www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/blog/f092-how-can-blockchain-bring-back-autonomy-to-the-physician-patient-relationship-leah-houston-hpec

This is the fourth episode in the short series about nurses who moved to entrepreneurship.   Mary Lou Ackerman is Vice President of Innovation and Digital Health with SE Health. Mary Lou is a founding member of SONSIEL (Society of Nursing Scientist, Innovator, and Entrepreneur Leaders) and an active member of CHIEF (Canada’s Health Informatics Executive Forum) with Digital Health Canada. Her background is extensive — she has led the development and implementation of many business transformation projects, innovations and partnerships. Mary Lou joined Saint Elizabeth in 1987 as a visiting nurse, and she has augmented her clinical background with a graduate business degree and significant experience with health informatics and technologies. Mary Lou has a passion for community health care, combined with a desire to advance care, creating innovative service models supported by digital health technologies, to create a future that will provide a personalized, accessible, meaningful health experience for individuals, their families and the service providers that support them.   More about other episodes: https://www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/blog/f087f091-series-nurses-the Are you a digital health startups? Check out Health Venture Lab and apply for their next accelerator program: https://hvlab.eu/

This is a third discussion in the short series about nurses going into entrepreneurship. Karmi Soder started working as a pediatric clinical care nurse in 1992. Today she is a skilled communicator with over 25 years of healthcare experience in clinical, administrative and tech, which she gained by serving as Chief Administrative Officer at Sutter Health, leading pediatric department for Kaiser Permanente, worked at Google and co-founded NewboRN Solutions — a registered nursing corporation, which aimed at helping new parents get the best care and shared community after the birth of their newborn. Based in Israel Karmi now works as a consultant for program development and strategy, analyzes, designs and executes improved operations and workflows.    More about the series: https://www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/blog/f087f091-series-nurses-the Apply for the Reactor accelerating program: https://hvlab.eu/program/1/reactor-2020

Sherezade Ruano is an Arrhythmia Specialist Nurse at Imperial College NHS Trust, Founder of RhythmiaBreath Medical Well-being programme and Co-Founder, CEO of RB Hub Digital Therapeutics. Passionate about the importance of mental wellbeing, stress and trauma in cardiac patients, Sherezade works closely with a team of world-renowned Mental Health specialists and Cardiologists offering outstanding services. In the interview she spoke about neurocardiology, struggles she came across as a nurse entrepreneur when looking for validators of her solution, she also commented the faster adoption of digital health in the UK because of COVID-19 and more.

2020 is the year of the nurse and the midwife. What do nurses actually do and why are they still a hidden innovation treasure in healthcare?   In this series consisting of discussions with nurse innovators, you will hear about: What nurses actually do, The changing role of nurses in healthcare, Relationship nurses have with technology — IT systems, new innovations, Why they should be at the policy making table.   The first episode features Shawna Butler, Nurse Economist and EntrepreNURSE from the US, currently the Host of SEE YOU NOW podcast, focused on sharing perspectives of nurses on healthcare. She is a member of the core team of the Exponential Medicine team at Singularity University. In this discussion, Shawna Buttler, speaks about the current situation healthcare workers have found themselves in due to COVID-19, what she’s learning about nurses through hosting the See you now podcast, we also touched very human aspects of nursing we don’t hear about often, that is the needs and support in end of life care. Recap of the series: https://www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/blog/f087f091-series-nurses-the

Karan Raj is a "veteran" in online education. He founded TheOSCEstation - an online medical education website with videos explaining different medical topics. TheOSCEstation primarily targets medical students and has been around on Youtube for several years. Dr. Raj works at Frimley Park Hospital NHS Foundation Trust as a Surgical Registrar, but he is also a Honorary Lecturer at Imperial College London, where he teaches e-learning & undergraduate medicine; he is Honorary Senior Lecturer at Sunderland University. He started using TikTok as a consumer in November 2019 and hardly in February this year, during a discussion with a colleague, he came up with the idea of talking about and explaining weird medical facts on TikTok. Following him, you can learn about embarrassing things he did as a doctor, weird things patients have said, and even more unusual topics such as - Can cheese give you nightmares? Recap: www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/blog/f086-tiktok-22-interested-in-weird-medical-facts-karannbspraj See also: F085 Tik tok 1/2: #MedicineExplained - doctors sharing medical knowledge in a whole new format (Amanda d’Almeida and Dan Villavecer)

There are three “laws” for successful TikTok posts: make people laugh, tell a personal story people can empathize with, or teach people something. Doctors use the platform to talk about their career paths; nurses use TikTok to record dancing routines during the breaks in their shifts. There’s an MRI image explanatory channel, and specialists from a broad spectrum talk about their expertise or give insight into their working environment.  MD candidates from the US Amanda d’Almeida and Dan Villavecer are the faces behind Medicine Explained. Medicine Explained is a channel with over 1.1 million of followers, explaining everyday issues such a “What is a brain freeze? How do menstrual cups work? What is scoliosis? Can women exercise, bathe or swim during their period?” etc. Dan and Amanda started creating content as a way to fight medical misinformation on the internet. Medicine Explained was started to decentralize medical information by making it understandable to everyone, acting as preventative health education to people around the world who may never have access to proper healthcare, but have access to social media.  In less than 6 months, the TikTok channel has amassed over 1.1 million followers and over 100 million views worldwide. The hashtag #MedicineExplained has over 100 Million views on the platform.  Dan and Amanda don’t show their faces but use drawings to get their point across.   Dan Villavecer is a current Doctor of Medicine (MD) candidate in the US, where he is the President of Medical Entrepreneurship. He received his Masters of Science in Cellular and Molecular Biology. Prior to starting his medical education, he worked at Forward (goforward.com) in San Francisco, which was among the first primary care practice providers with a truly patient-centered design, at Forward doctors sit next to the patient in the doctor’s office, not behind the computer screen etc. Forward is an exemplary case of how the doctor-patient relationship can look like in the modern era and was listed as a Top 25 Inventions of 2017 by Time Magazine for reinventing primary care. Amanda d’Almeida is a current dual Doctor of Medicine (MD) and Master of Public Health (MPH) candidate. She was part of Nature published Beat AML program, which created the largest-to-date dataset on primary acute myeloid leukemia (AML) samples offering genomic, clinical, and drug response data. Amanda and Dan currently also work as interns at Lumos - AI-powered search tool for doctors that gives direct answers to clinical questions, using trustworthy sources. In this discussion, you will hear more about their thinking. They offered insight into the current state of medical education, their creative process, content strategy on TikTok and more. More on: www.facesofdigitalhealth.com

This is the fourth and final episode of a short series of discussions with doctors that moved from full-time clinical practice to work in digital health. Guillem Serra is a serial entrepreneur coming from a family of doctors. His mother, father, grandfather, and great grandfather were doctors, which made it easy for Guillem to go study medicine given his familiarity with the profession. Besides medicine, he studied math and during his medical studies, discovered, that for him, medicine was actually boring. Today, he is a Physician and Mathematician with deep knowledge in the eHealth market, MedTech, and startups in the field of medicine. He founded several digital health startups and is an investor and board member to many startups. His first company MediQuo is a "Whatsapp for healthcare" - a platform enabling patients to chat with doctors and specialists 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in a secure way, with all the tools and compliance needed for healthcare.   Summary of the episodes in the series: https://www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/blog/f081-084-doctors-and-digital-health Presented in the series: Daniel Kraft: https://danielkraftmd.net/ Exponential Medicine: exponential.singularityu.org/ Digital.Health: https://www.digital.health/ Mediquo:  https://www.mediquo.com/ Dock.Health: https://www.dock.health/ Cinapsis: https://www.cinapsis.org/

This is the third discussion in a short series about doctors who left clinical practice to work as entrepreneurs in digital health. In the previous episodes, Daniel Kraft talked about a new idea for more precise dosing of medications chronic patients with comorbidities have to take daily, he also shared his thoughts about COVID-19 management in the US and innovation efforts to aid the pandemic, Michael Docktor, former full time pediatric gastroenterologist and Clinical Dir. of Innovation Boston Children's Hospital talked about better task management in hospital settings and healthcare suited app called Dock-Health which he co-founded. Today, we are moving from the US to UK. You will hear from Owain Rhys Hughes - NHS surgeon who left clinical practice to build an advice and guidance platform for clinicians. In this discussion, you will hear why are referrals from primary to secondary care suboptimal how can they be improved with one solution that can impact GPs efficacy in referring patients to specialists, it, optimizes care specialists give to patients once they see them, it can drive down costs and most importantly, offer patients an incredibly improved experience with the healthcare system.    Cinapsis: https://www.cinapsis.org/  Summary of the series: www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/blog/f081-084-doctors-and-digital-health   Other speakers/prrojects presented in this series:  Daniel Kraft: https://danielkraftmd.net/  Exponential Medicine: exponential.singularityu.org/  Digital.Health: https://www.digital.health/  Mediquo:  https://www.mediquo.com/  Dock.Health: https://www.dock.health/