Hospitals

Of course, after just spending four days in a hospital, I am now obsessed with the medical profession. In the past few years, I have said that if I were starting angel investing today, I would focus on medical technology and crypto, where the changes in the next decade will be tremendous.

I read about this. A small study led by researchers at Stanford University sequenced the genomes of 12 people who arrived at two California hospitals between December 2020 and May 2021. Using a commercial Oxford Nanopore sequencer and distributed cloud-based computing, the team sequenced genomes in a matter of hours and leveraged the data to make definitive diagnoses. They identified a genetic cause of early-onset epilepsy in a 3-month old baby, for instance, and showed that they could go from a blood draw to a genome-based diagnosis in less than eight hours. (Sources: neo.life, New England Journal of Medicine). This is just amazing!

I am reading about robotic surgery that is less invasive on the body and more exact. I am also reading more about traveling nurses, who get paid multiple times more than other nurses, but will they get the same insurance? All of the above is a small microcosm of change taking place in hospitals. Think about Urgent Care, game-changing—no need to sit in an emergency room for hours on end for an ear infection.

Yet, through all of this information and conversations, the one clear thing is we all need to be our own doctors. Doctors are not the lord of your medicare anymore. Dr. Google has allowed all of us to understand more about our health and to be able to ask questions that we might not have thought about before. The Mighty (I am an investor) has countless communities for people and families facing health challenges. Who else to learn from and lean on than people going through the same health issues?

I have heard of doctors prescribing medications without diving into a patient’s chart to see what other meds they are taking. It was the patient who figured out those two medicines were not compatible. People who have gone through invitro multiple times only to realize that this is far from an exact science, and it should be based on each person’s body and the data. I have gone to multiple doctors to understand why something happened, but it took the sixth one to dig deeper.

The insurance system has created many of these problems because of time and cost. The entire system needs a reboot. Telemedicine is one step in the right direction. The more I read, just like everything else right now, there is a pull to the future and interest to hold on to the past. Just like education, there is not a silver bullet but multiple bullets. Something has to change. One of them would be getting private equity out of the hospital game. Why cut costs to make Wall Street happy when it comes to saving lives?

Looking to new ideas that are cost-efficient makes a lot more sense.