State of the Health Care Industry - What Now?

Join the Wharton Club of New Jersey for a panel discussion on this timely topic.

July 14, 2011 – Panel Discussion: State of the Healthcare Industry – What Now?

Healthcare continues to be topic “numero uno” to many of us as leaders, to most of us as students of businesses facing turbulent times, and to nearly all of us as consumers. Wouldn’t you love to hear top executives in this field share their views about where the industry’s going and how it’s going to affect us…and interact with them directly? Now’s your chance!

The Wharton Club of NJ invites you to a panel of senior industry statesmen in dialog about the state of the healthcare industry, and what’s next for players as well as consumers. Panelists (see bios below) represent a broad range of experience, with enough seniority to warrant solo speaking slots. It’s a rare treat to have them together, in lively interaction.

Dr. Joseph Kim on biomedical innovation and entrepreneurship

I can't take any credit here. Sometimes I like to blog about my namesake since I have such a common name. Joseph Kim is a very common name.

Well, Dr. J. Joseph Kim, the CEO of Inovio, spoke at Thunderbird about his remarkable entrepreneurial story. I hope that someday I may also have an entrepreneurial story to tell.

Dr. Kim primarily spoke about vaccine technology and DNA vaccines. He also shared some of his views on entrepreneurship:

• The importance of trust in business, especially in new ventures. How successful entrepreneurs surround themselves with people they trust and who don’t need to be monitored and controlled (”he’s running out of friends to hire”)
• The importance of a quality education (MIT and Penn in his case) not only as a source of knowledge, but as a source of mentors and friends
• The intrinsic value of failure in entrepreneurship. The odds are always against the entrepreneur. For every successful venture there may be dozen failures. And every successful entrepreneur has learned to deal with failure and use failure as learning
• How he’s main drive as an entrepreneur is to “have an impact”. One needs not be ashamed of profits. Profits drive business, and without business there would not be much technological progress (governments and NGOs have not proven too effective at producing new technologies and drugs). But at the end of the day, it is the passion for the product, the innovation, and the impact one has in the world that must drive the entrepreneur.
• Business leaders need to ask themselves whether the world would be any different if their business didn’t exist. If the answer is no, they’d better think about doing something else.

To read the full story on the Thunderbird website, click here.

US News college rankings and MIT

MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) was ranked as #4 overall among U.S. universities and #1 in engineering. Specific engineering disciplines at MIT that U.S. News also ranked as the nation's best include: aeronautics and astronautics, chemical, electrical and computer science, materials and mechanical (that was me). I studied mechanical engineering at MIT and look at me now. I'm blogging about medicine and technology. The MIT Sloan School of Management was rated the nation's fifth MBA program behind Harvard, Stanford, Northwestern and the University of Pennsylvania. A salute to all my friends and colleagues from MIT!

Contest eaters face serious health issues

In a former life, I was almost a contest eater. Not for speed, but for quantity. That was a very long time ago. Do you ever watch those food eating contests? They are crazy! CNN has a story titled, "Speed eaters gain weight, clog arteries but have few regrets." Maybe they don't have many regrets while they're still young and relatively healthy, but this type of behavior can catch up to you, especially if you're Don Lerman who set a record by eating seven sticks of salted butter in five minutes. During six years of competitive eating, he gained 100 pounds! The average adult in the U.S. gains 1 pound per year. If you gain 100 pounds in 6 years, how many pounds are you gaining each year? (certainly you're above the mean)

In 2007, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine doctors who specialize in gastroenterology and radiology conducted an experiment on the stomach activities of a competitive eater and an average eater. Do you know what they found? Competitive eaters lacked muscle contractions called peristalsis, which move the food down the digestive tract. The researchers published a paper where they warned about: possible "morbid obesity, profound gastroparesis, intractable nausea and vomiting, and even the need for a gastrectomy." Yikes!

I wonder what we're going to learn about competitive eaters over the next decade. If you exercise, can you eat anything you want to eat? Does exercise give you freedom to eat? (It does for me - that's why I can enjoy ice cream and be guilt-free). Read the CNN story here.

Inovio developing a swine flu vaccine

Inovio is developing a swine flu vaccine. Here's the headline: "Inovio Biomedical, National Microbiology Laboratory, and University of Pennsylvania to Evaluate Candidate DNA Vaccines Against “Swine” Influenza A (H1N1)"

Inovio has established a new collaboration with the National Microbiology Laboratory of the Public Health Agency of Canada and the University of Pennsylvania to further evaluate Inovio DNA vaccine candidates against swine influenza A (H1N1) virus. Dr. J. Joseph Kim (no, that's not me), Inovio’s CEO, stated, “The current swine flu outbreak highlights the fact that the world cannot rely solely on the “catch-up” strategy of influenza vaccine design. We need vaccines that provide at least some broad protective capability against evolving seasonal influenza strains and those with pandemic potential. We have already achieved significant validating data in large animal models regarding the ability of Inovio’s consensus vaccines to protect against unmatched strains of different influenza sub-types and look forward to the data resulting from this collaboration of vaccine experts.”

It's a Tree-Climbing Robot!

This may seem a bit off-topic, but you'll see me tying this into medicine and technology. This photo on the right is of a tree-climbing robot developed by engineers at the University of Pennsylvania. RiSE is a four-legged robot that can both scamper along the ground and rapidly climb a tree or a pole. RiSE V3 was designed and built at Boston Dynamics (they make the four-legged military robot BigDog).

So how is this robotic technology relevant to medicine and technology? It's relevant because robotic technology has been used to help disabled people walk (ReWalk Exoskeleton). As engineers develop more sophisticated robots, this type of technology may translate over to the healthcare field and help people who are physically disabled. Image source: Technology Review.