Kaplan: Personalized Medicine by Design
Saturday, October 13, 2018
Saul Kaplan
Our U.S. healthcare system is leaving too many individuals and families behind. It delivers a fragmented, confusing, over-specialized, unaffordable and painful experience for far too many of us. Healthcare institutions are slow to disrupt themselves by leveraging new emerging technologies to transform the customer experience, and the healthcare system as currently comprised is unsustainable financially.
Healthcare is ripe for disruption. It is up to all of us to make sure that we disrupt it on behalf of those being left behind by today’s system. It is up to us to imagine a new healthcare system that puts individuals and families first. We need a new system in which families have access to the information, tools, and resources necessary to improve their own health and wellbeing. We need a new healthcare system that puts us at its core.
In the exploratory phase of our Personalized Medicine By Design project, we will establish a strong foundation of understanding of today’s healthcare customer experience. Any transformational personalized medicine business model must start with an understanding of the job-to-be-done from the customer’s point of view, not primarily from the perspective of today’s healthcare institutions and system. We will not be admiring the problems of today’s healthcare system, they are well known. We are seeking to understand how individuals and families experience the current healthcare system and their pain points as a jumping off point for imagining how we might transform, not tweak, it. A rigorous human-centered exploration phase will inform the design and prototyping of a transformational personalized medicine business model with healthcare consumers and families at the core.
We won’t start with the question, how can we improve today’s healthcare system. Building on a deep understanding of healthcare customer experience as an actionable foundation for design we will start with the question, Can we imagine a new healthcare system that is in service of helping families better manage their own health and wellbeing? We won’t get bogged down worrying about scalability and how to change the current system until we have demonstrated at a small scale that there is a better way that is financially viable. Let’s figure out what we want to change to before we obsess over how to change the way it works today. It’s time to create the conditions to imagine, design, prototype, and commercialize a transformative new patient and family-centered business model unconstrained by how healthcare works today.
I have been waiting for the stars to align for personalized medicine and to lead this BIF project for a long time. Over my career, I have engaged in and have every black and blue mark imaginable from working in and trying to change every aspect of how today’s healthcare system and business models work. Our passion at BIF is making transformation safer and easier to manage. As a leader in the healthcare industry, a strategy consultant, a government bureaucrat, and as the founder and Chief Catalyst of BIF I have led teams working on the mindsets, muscles, and tools to enable business model transformation and healthcare has always been my home industry.
I worked at Eli Lilly and Company in the 1980’s and will never forget the opportunity to witness first-hand how genomics might transform healthcare when I got to attend the opening of the world’s first commercial scale recombinant DNA manufacturing facility. I was wowed by Lilly’s fete of tricking e-coli into producing human insulin at scale. Fast forward to today when the cost of mapping our own personal genome is rapidly approaching $100 and companies are already being launched that will offer us the opportunity to map and store our genome for free if we allow them to monetize our most valuable data set, our double helix. What if we made sure that we controlled our own healthcare information and who and how others can access it?
As a road-warrior strategy consultant, I worked with the visionary Mark Levin, founder of Millennium, who was early with a personalized medicine vision to transform the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry in the 1990’s. Mark’s idea was brilliant but the technology hadn’t advanced enough for a transformational business model to take hold. I never forgot the boldness of his vision and have always believed that it would ultimately come to pass. I believe that personalized medicine is now a viable business model with the potential to transform healthcare. We can already see its transformational potential in the diagnosis and treatment of many forms of cancer. The changes we can now see in personalizing cancer care and treatment will expand to other diseases and care paths. The promise of personalized medicine is within reach and hugely disruptive to every aspect of today’s healthcare system. What if we made sure that personalized medicine business models were designed with individuals and families at their core?
As a geek wannabe, I’ve always lived in the space between emerging technologies and new business models. Emerging technologies including genomics, big data, artificial intelligence, Internet of things, blockchain and all things digital are at a stage where they can actually be deployed in service of new human-centered business models. They are all capabilities in our sandbox ready to be combined and recombined to enable a personalized medicine vision. I was troubled when in 2011 the National Research Council declared that personalized medicine was an antiquated term and should be replaced by the more technology friendly label of precision medicine. I’m certain new technologies will continue to fill our business model sandbox enabling us to more precisely diagnose and treat disease. Today, these new technologies are out ahead of the business models to deliver their value at scale, and their development is predominantly shaped through the lens of today’s healthcare institutions and not customer experience. We need to transform from a sick care to a wellness model. To transform healthcare we will have to put the personalized back into precision medicine.
Our collaborative exploration of personalized medicine opportunities will put individuals and families at the center of our design process. It will bridge the exciting space between enabling agency at the consumer level and leveraging emerging technologies to transform customer experience and outcomes. Join us. We’ve created a Personalized Medicine by Design Facebook group to welcome other purposeful networks like Overlap and Hatch, companies and institutions that want to play and any individuals interested in project updates or engaging in our exploration process. Let’s transform healthcare together.
Saul Kaplan is the Founder and Chief Catalyst of the Business Innovation Factory (BIF). Saul shares innovation musings on his blog at It’s Saul Connected and on Twitter at @skap5.
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