The Soul of Biotech

On Saturday, January 17th, I took a break from helping organize this year’s Mystery Hunt to attend the 6th Annual HBS Healthcare Conference in Boston, MA. I took extensive notes on the conference, and will spread out my notes across a few posts.

The leading keynote featured Lonnie Smith of Intuitive Surgical, which makes robotic surgery equipment that allow remote surgery. The devices themselves are remarkable, as demonstrated by a video that showed a doctor delicately peeling a grape from several feet away.

More interesting were Mr. Smith’s points on disruptive innovation. Smith first introduced the conventional disruptive innovation model, highlighted in Geoffrey Moore’s classic, “Crossing the Chasm”. Smith then went on to identify the first application for Da Vinci, Intuitive’s first device: prostate cancer. Market research showed that patient’s priorities in prostate cancer removal were focused on (in order): Cancer removal, Continence, Potency, Safety, Pain, and Blood Loss. Da Vinci achieved improvements in all of these. More importantly, patients began to drive adoption of the technology, not physicians. This “crossed the chasm” for Intuitive’s technology. More indications have followed suit.

When Mr. Smith explained how patients drove adoption, I was reminded of websites such as PatientsLikeMe, which allow patients to communicate about their treatments for serious disorders, such as cancer. I think it’s important to remember that medical learnings and achievements in patient care can travel through informal patient networks much (and informal physician collaboration networks, such as Sermo) more quickly than through formal physician networks such as conferences and journals. So what’s stopping adoption of those disruptive innovations?

No related posts.