David Shaywitz

Digital platforms such as Peloton and Tonal have clearly learned how to use emerging technologies to cultivate healthy exercise habits and a loyal base of fitness-focused customers. These same technologies would seem ideally suited – if presented in the right way – to coax more people off the couch in the first place.  This represents an enormous health — and... Read More

Astute TR readers might have noticed that I’ve been writing a lot about digital fitness lately, in contrast to digital pharma.  This is deliberate, and represents an evolution of my thinking. I was first drawn to digital health over a decade ago, in the context of a translational medicine training program for medical scientists that I developed with Dr. Denny... Read More

Whether you are an “exercist,” who relentlessly talks up the benefits of regular exercise to anyone who will listen, or instead are like the vast majority of people and conscientiously avoid exercise, you will find something appealing in the recently published Exercised, by Harvard anthropologist Daniel Lieberman. Those who assiduously avoid unnecessary exertion – pretty much the definition of exercise... Read More

I recently discussed the rise of digital fitness, and specifically how companies like Peloton are succeeding by delivering an engaging experience. The new crop of digital fitness companies have figured out how to make health-promoting activities that are intrinsically tedious – like riding a stationary bike – into something compelling and sustaining. A New York Times writer, Amanda Hess, captures... Read More

Three quick data science items: 1) How pharma companies could engage more constructively with data scientists. 2) How health system barriers to data sharing inhibit robust evaluation of the underlying science. 3) The savvy way the FDA is thinking about data science. Learning From SpaceX On Wednesday, Elon Musk’s SpaceX landed a prototype spacecraft vertically on the ground — a... Read More

Digital tools played a critical role in accelerating the development and evaluation of COVID-19 vaccines, according to leaders at the companies driving this effort.  Speaking at a recent virtual panel discussion organized by the Galien Foundation (and available here), leaders from Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Janssen, Moderna, and the CRO IQVIA shared their experiences leveraging digital tools for vaccine development. Data Deluge... Read More

Despite, or perhaps because, of the incessant hype, it can be difficult to assess the impact AI is actually having in medicine.  Enter Harvard’s Zak Kohane, who in a remarkably astute recent seminar, available on YouTube, highlighted the opportunities for AI in healthcare while revealing some of the ways AI is falling short – generally by being deployed in a... Read More

The unreasonable effectiveness of personal narrative – and what it means for persuasion and health The goal of “alternative facts,” is “to flood the zone with sh*t,” as former Trump advisor Steve Bannon notoriously explained to the author Michael Lewis. The idea is to persuade us it’s just too difficult to know what to believe about anything.  This “manufactured nihilism,”... Read More

“Their story — yours, mine — it’s what we all carry with us on this trip that we take, and we owe it to each other to respect our stories and learn from them.” — Dr. William Carlos Williams to Dr. Robert Coles, from Coles’s “The Call of Stories.” The term “data empathy” is on the verge of entering the... Read More

The mRNA vaccines for COVID-19, developed by Moderna and BioNTech/Pfizer, were a conspicuous bright spot in a generally devastating year. Besides giving us a chance to bring the pandemic to an end, they remind us more generally of the profoundly transformative potential of emerging technologies.  Audacious scientific and entrepreneurial ambitions can take years of grinding persistence, often sounding unrealistic or... Read More

From the moment Joe Biden takes the oath in January, his Administration will confront a brutal onslaught of urgent health challenges. The work starts with the complex distribution of a multi-dose vaccine to a remarkably skeptical public. To do this job, and countless others, there is a desperate need to upgrade the nation’s health data capabilities, which were pressure-tested by COVID-19... Read More

The application of technology to medicine offers the promise of better, more intelligent care; yet success has proved elusive.  To better understand this, we will consider, first the broad ambition of the “learning health system,” understand the general challenges presented by electronic health records (EHRs), and then finally, consider the complexity of a topical use case: a consortia’s effort to... Read More

Why not healthcare? That’s the core question at the heart of efforts to apply emerging digital and data technologies to healthcare and life science.  As Suchi Saria, an entrepreneur and a computer scientist at John Hopkins, where she directs the Machine Learning and Healthcare Lab, puts it, in the 2000s, these technologies transformed sectors, such as banking, in a fashion... Read More

The COVID-19 crisis created an urgent need for healthcare data. For starters, it was necessary to characterize the spread of the pandemic. Quickly, reports were needed on the capacity of healthcare facilities responsible for care of the severely afflicted. Then there was the urgent need to assess the trajectory, and outcomes, of patients admitted to hospitals.  The profound difficulty our... Read More

In today’s Wall Street Journal, I review The Innovation Delusion, a new book arguing that innovation is overrated and maintenance is underrated; moreover, the authors assert, we have magical thinking around innovation, and often view it as fairy dust that can be imported from Silicon Valley then sprinkled on ossifying organizations to revive and rejuvenate them. (Steve Blank discussed the... Read More

Medicine is plagued by a feedback gap, or perhaps more accurately, a feedback paradox.  On the one hand, clinicians are bombarded by feedback. Every day, there are a slew of process and billing metrics to review, providing an accounting of the volume of patients seen, and the intensity of each visit.  How thorough was the exam? What procedures may have... Read More

Entrepreneurial stories, often told through the narrative framework of the hero’s journey, are by now well past the point of cliché.  Yet, it’s important, perhaps even instructive, to remind ourselves every now and again about the exceptional, transformative power of entrepreneurship, the can-do thinking it motivates, and the remarkable progress it can propel. This potential emerged as a central theme... Read More