Category: IT

Podmedics, founded in the UK in 2007, got started as a way for founder and former family practitioner Ed Wallitt to make use of travel time by recording his medical notes by dictaphone. The notes became popular among classmates prompting his desire to release the notes to the general public through his website and itunes where it became a featured podcast.   Podmedics now features both podcasts and an online learning environment where a user can keep and download notes associated with the podcasts. Their latest work, The Podmedics Do Surgery, is getting attention as it is the first medical ibook created specifically for medical students.   Podmedics started out as a series of podcasts on various medical topics. How did the ibook come about? Wallitt: ibooks immediately opened up the possibility for really anybody who can work a word processor to be able to produce a textbook. But not just any textbook — a textbook that includes also interactive images and video.  So for us at podmedics this was perfect. We already have all these videos and we have a large image bank as well. So it was just a question of getting a grip on the technology and […]

After wrapping up a second day of hearing so many ideas about start-ups in health care, Health 2.0 Spring Fling in Boston left me wanting to start my own company and join all the entrepreneurs that attended. As a small representative sample of the groups of entrepreneurs that form the Health 2.0 space, who better than the chairs of the Health 2.0 organization to interview?   Indu Subaiya, Co-Chairman and CEO of Health 2.0: “Is responsible for Health 2.0’s strategic direction and incredible production values. She started her career in health technology assessment at Quorum Consulting and then served as VP of Healthcare at Gerson Lehrman Group, an investment research firm. Before co-founding Health 2.0 she was Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Physic Ventures, where she helped evaluate companies. When she is not running Health 2.0, she applies her producing and directing skills to making film.” Not to mention that she is also an MD who decided to take the entrepreneur path. I bet many of us can relate. Matthew Holt, Co-Chairman of Health 2.0: “Spent the 1990s learning from the best to be a health care futurist at Institute for the Future, and a survey researcher at Harris Interactive. In the early […]

At TEDMED we also had a a very interesting conversation with Jacob Scott (watch Jacob’s TEDMED talk) whose impressive background was strong enough to throw us out of concentration a couple of times. But behind all this great history there is a very simple and cool guy who we befriended along the conference social gatherings and with whom we hope to stay in touch. We spoke mainly about how med school need to change and we were surprised when later on fellow speaker Sandeep Kishore (watch Sandeep’s TEDMED talk) echoed the same feelings and thoughts about who is educating our future physicians. “Sunny” also was one of our favorite guys from TEDMED, he already added me to his Young Professional Chronic Disease Network (YPCDN) and we will definitely do anything in our power to help. Giving the fact that these two similarly made such an influence on us and on the crowd –and based on their common ideas– we decided to ask them the same questions. MC: You argue that the system selects the least creative candidates for medical school. What is the reason for this? Jacob: Not necessarily the least creative. It’s not selecting for creative people and I think that the more […]