Author: Lukas Zinnagl

IT, Sonstiges

Reverse Mentoring

Lukas Zinnagl

There’s a story of Barry Diller, the famed Chairman of IAC, an internet behemoth with lots of succesful web properties in its very broad porftfolio of technology investments. Diller, now 69, was said to excessively, make use of a concept known as “reverse mentoring”. As the title suggests, the idea is that the typically younger, less experienced person, who has knowledge in a particula area, gives advice to the more senior person. This works amazingly well in a setup with an executive such as Barry Diller. Jack Welch, Management-Guru und CEO of GE is also known for using a reverse mentored decision process. He, the experience business person, with a track record in print publishing is being told that the company needs to move towards the internet to be sucessful. By asking the modern customer, the young, internet-savvy users, he gets insight into the market he wants to enter. It’s a great and simple concept as long as the senior to-be-mentored person shows humblness and willingness to learn from a less experienced person, which makes this more of a psychological obstacle, then an organizational one. Does reverse mentoring have its raison d’être also in medicine? Are you aware of a […]

Sonstiges

How To Collaborate in Hospitals – A Use Case for Yammer

Lukas Zinnagl

Hospitals are like big corporations. We’ve written about this already in other posts and it’s more true than ever these days. Hospitals exhibit all the elements of the modern corporation (actually there is a neat writeup about how the corporation has evolved): intransparent, hierarchical, heavy. Now, in contrast to hospitals, corporations know that collaborational tools are vital for any big, closed social network. They act as the communicational backbone and make sure that the people who are supposed to be on the same page are on the same page. Now there are certainly flaws to existing systems, otherwise the old fashioned e-mail wouldn’t exist as the primary form of communication. These software applications enhance internal corporate communication, facilitate workflows between different teams and create a sense of corporate identity. We are big fans of those fancy web applications with staggering valuations, big rounds of funding and superstar founders and thus we’ve looked into some web applications that could find their way into a modern hospital environment. This is the first in a series of posts on collaboration tools. Stay tuned for more good stuff to come.   Yammer was coined the “Twitter for Companies“. It was launched a couple of […]

IT, Sonstiges

I Am Not A Physician

Lukas Zinnagl

Am I a physician or am I not? That’s how Shakespeare might have put it. This question seems trivial yet, at least for physicians reading this blog, the answer might not be as straightforward as it seems at first. For physicians having their own office or working in the hospital it’s pretty pretty pretty clear, as Larry David would have said. Working as a physician on a daily, clinical basis you are probably going to be treated as a physician and feel as a physician. If you have a dual degree in medicine and economics, such as an MBA, working for a pharmaceutical company, a case that is hardly unusual by the way, the situation becomes more complex. Clearly, you went to med school, worked in a hospital have your M.D. on your business card – but are you a physician and even more importantly do you feel like a physician? Whether you are a physician or you are not is not an easy question to answer. There is a really fine line in this whole game. Would you call somebody a physician who “just” finished Med School, but didn’t do residency? Or what if the person only did 3 […]

IT

Meet Healthysparx – A Quora for Health

Lukas Zinnagl

It hasn’t been long ago that we’ve internally discussed the viability of a health-focused version of Quora, the hyped Silicon Valley based Q&A startup founded by two former Facebook engineers. For our readers who are not familiar with Quora, let us give you a quick background. The site aims to be not just another Q&A site like Answers.com or Yahoo! Answers, but a worldwide repository of genre-specific answers to any sort of question. The startup has a strong focus on user interface and the quality of the content. Starting from punctuation to capitalization and content of questions and corresponding answers – all is closely being watched and edited by a dedicated team of community and/or quality assurance managers. Apart from its initial hype, the principle is working in the field of technology, startups and investing. Through the founders fame and a whopping amount of funding, they’ve attracted CEOs, famous founders and tech celebs that are not only passively using the service, but are also adding their answers – that’s something new. Now- meet healthysparx, which aims to bring the Q&A model to medicine. Admittedly we can’t think of many more fields of work, aside from medicine, where such an approach […]

IT

Interview with Abbott’s Diabetes Head Asia Pacific: Andreas Amrein

Lukas Zinnagl

After we’ve had an interview with the amazing and insightful Dr. Bryan Vartebedian as well as the inspirational Lisa Chu, we thought that we should also talk to somebody who’s on the pharma side of the healthcare industry. Dr. Andreas Amrein, who is the Senior Area Director for the Diabetes Unit of Abbott in Asia Pacific, thankfully took some time to answer our questions on the intersection of technology and diabetes. Diabetes is clearly a prevalent problem in civilized countries and to us it seems that pharmaceutical companies are still slow in developing disruptive technological solutions for diabetic patients. Andreas, who was originally trained as a phycisist as the prestigious ETH in Zuerich, has some insights on how a globally acting pharmaceutical company thinks about a global healthcare problem and its solution within healthcare. Initially, the contact between Andreas and MedCrunch came from the Virtual Pharma Summit, where Andreas and MedCrunch will participate in a virtual round table. Join the event here and have fun with the interview! MedCrunch: Dear Mr. Amrein, thanks for your time. To give us and our readers a little background, please let us know how you came into the pharmaceutical business. Originally I am a […]

IT

Rock Health – A Model for Funding Health 2.0 Ideas

Lukas Zinnagl

Although happily being located in the heart of Europe, both Franz and I have spent a decent amount of the time in the US and it’s still great to see the innovation coming out of certain areas across the ocean. One of the recent additions on the venture capital, incubator and tech funding game has been Rock Health. A pleasent and transparent alternative to chunky venture capital firms or other institutional investors and a self-proclaimed “seed accelerator for health apps”. The Rock Health approach is clear and understandable for people who are not so fundraising-savvy. The program is dedicated to entrepreneurs who want to build applications or products that are dedicated to solving health-related issues. So if you are a young medical doctor, medical student or any other person who believes in technology and its capability to help improving health, then you should definitively have a look at what the fund offers. At a glance $20,000 startup grant to each team Support from the Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation and Cincinnati Childrens Hospital Mentorship and workshops from experts in design, health policy, lean startup methodology, financing, and more Office space in Silicon Valley Office hours with startup counsel lawyer Michael Esquivel and legal […]

IT

10 Things Doctors can Learn from Programmers

Lukas Zinnagl

Software development is a subject that isn’t really understood by the public. It’s being treated as something obscure, technical and nerdy. That’s bad, because it has implications for us physicians. We are living in a technological world and are surrounded by products that all once required a piece of code to make it work. From cars to web applications and MRIs. All of these fields require programmers that make use of syntax to tell the products or programs what to do and what to show. The input, a.k.a. the code, is strict and follows a defined set of rules that enable it to work. Programmers (and equivalently engineers from all walks) are often wrongly treated as necessary elements for any product, yet they are hardly being treated as they deserve to be treated – as the people who make things work and who are eventually responsible for a space shuttle bursting or a website being down. Now I don’t really know how to code, except for some HTML and CSS, but I’ve spent endless hours with both physicians and programmers. What came to my mind recently, is that good physicians run through programms in their head. Apart from being empathic […]