I have been doing video interviews with a number of C level executives, VCs and practitioners about acrobatics they have been seeing in various vertical sectors during the COVID-19 crisis and the "New normal" they can expect as the economy wakes up. See the full list here.
This time it is David Watson, an Executive in Residence at Health2047, the innovation and venture arm of the American Medical Association. I met him when he was CTO at Kaiser Permanente. Before that he had been at Allergan and Baxter Healthcare. After Kaiser, he was at Oracle, then several healthcare startups.
He describes the explosion in telemedicine after being "in experimental mode" for two decades. During this crisis, the UC San Francisco health system saw 50% of outpatient visits move to telemedicine. It was 2% prior to that.
He presents a couple of sobering perspectives - in the middle of a pandemic, we are seeing healthcare layoffs, and 30 million citizens with no healthcare insurance as they lose their jobs. We discuss likely changes to healthcare economics and funding models.
We discuss potential new entrants. He says mobilizing for a crisis is very different from being a market entrant with long term aspirations. We discuss the slow move to cloud computing in the healthcare sector. We also discuss the state of Public Health infrastructure and the future of pandemic modeling.
He covers a lot of ground - not a surprise given he has seen the industry from so many angles and for so long.
