Special Guest: John Brownstein
Dr. John Brownstein is Chief Innovation Officer at Boston Children's Hospital
Today I’m excited to share my recent conversation with Dr. John Brownstein, Chief Innovation Officer at Boston Children’s Hospital, who I’ve had the pleasure of working with over the past few years. He shares his perspectives on the future of healthcare, how to facilitate innovation in academia, and how to bridge the gap between hospitals and startups. We also touch on the amazing work his group has done to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.
Scott: Thanks for taking the time John! To start off, could you tell us a bit about your background, how you ended up in your current role at Boston Children's, and what your day-to-day actually looks like?
John: Sure — my background is in epidemiology, and my interest in the field came from recognizing that there was an opportunity to bring large data sets to bear to understand the health of populations. I was on a medical school path at the time and I saw epidemiology as a way to combine my interest in health with other areas like computer science, geography, and statistics. Specifically, my expertise is in emerging infectious diseases and developing tools to understand how diseases emerge, why they emerge, and how to track them.
Eventually, I became a professor at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children's Hospital, and got interested in the fact that a lot of the IP we were generating in my research group could be commercialized and turned into startups. I got involved in founding a couple of startups myself and learned about that path — both the exciting aspects of commercializing research in the startup world but also the pain points of taking IP from an academic environment and building a company. That’s always been a real challenge.
In academic circles, there's finally starting to be a view that founding a startup is not necessarily a bad thing, and in fact, there are different advantages that come with it. With my experience, I realized that as a hospital, there were ways for us to be more supportive of researcher who wanted to be both clinicians and entrepreneurs. There were an incredible number of opportunities around us, but we as an organization needed to foster those ideas in a way that facilitated innovation, instead of being a heavy handed bureaucracy.
So I became the Chief Innovation Officer at the hospital, built an accelerator, and started developing a pipeline of startups coming out of the hospital. Along the way, we also recognized that we could do a better job of working with outside startups — supporting them and being a real nimble partner — which would help us transform the patient journey with new tools and technologies as well. So that's what my last six years have been about in the role.
Scott: That's awesome. With the work you’ve done encouraging internal innovation, I’m curious what the appetite for entrepreneurship looks like among hospital faculty? How many are gung-ho about going out and starting their own company as a full time endeavor versus serving as an inventor / advisor for a team that’s brought in?
John: I don't know the exact percentage, but I think there’s definitely fewer people who are looking to actually lead a company. There are some people who come up with great ideas and say, this is my destiny, I want to go run it, but it takes a lot. More often, someone at the hospital might come up with a great invention and we’ll find that there’s already a startup doing something similar. Our goal then is to create a matchmaking situation between the startup and the inventor and explore avenues for a collaboration. Since there’s so much activity in the digital health space today, unless you have an incredibly novel idea, it often makes sense to try and partner with the outside world as opposed to starting something new.
Scott: That makes a lot of sense. Earlier, you alluded to the fact that people from the academic world are slowly becoming more open to the idea of starting companies to commercialize research. I’d love to dive into that more — how have you seen people’s mindset towards this change during your time as Chief Innovation Officer?
John: It's definitely changed dramatically over the last few years. When I first started in the role, it was still not widely accepted that you could play in the commercial space as an academic researcher or institution. I think now people recognize that we need the commercial sector, because what's the value of all these incredible new inventions if they don't see the light of day with patients?
There’s also more of an acceptance that commercializing research can bring real revenue opportunities back to the hospital in the long run, which we were losing out on because we weren’t being nimble and fast enough. With that in mind, I think people are finally getting aligned behind the importance of supporting innovation, whether it's at the individual level or the enterprise level. The mindset has changed dramatically within our organization over time, but also across the whole ecosystem.
Scott: That’s great to hear, and I am sure your group’s efforts in supporting new technologies have helped drive that change in mindset as well. I want to switch gears a bit and touch on the flip side of your work. We’ve talked about how your group facilitates internal innovation and inventions that come out of the hospital. How do you think about bringing external startups into the fold and bridging the gap between them and a place like Boston Children’s?
John: We definitely do a lot of outbound recruiting, to identify startups and make them aware of us. We're part of the KidsX accelerator, a consortium of 40 children’s hospitals across the country which was just formed to accelerate pediatric innovation. We're constantly on the speaking circuit to get our name out there. We have our own Innovation & Digital Health Accelerator that anyone can apply to, both for internal ideas and external organizations. One thing thats’s unique about our group is we try to fully engage with each startup and understand their needs, rather than just taking a cookie cutter approach. I think that’s how we’ve been able to succeed.
Scott: Switching gears again, I wanted to ask you about the pandemic, as I know you’ve been leading a bunch of different response efforts. What has it been like as an epidemiologist living through this once-in-a-lifetime event? And could you tell us a bit about your group’s work on this front?
John: It's been quite a year for sure. My group has been working for two decades now on building a variety of tools to respond to pandemics like this one — supporting early identification of disease, monitoring spread, looking at the impact of different interventions and supporting vaccine rollouts. And we've done all of those things over the past year with COVID-19.
We were involved in identifying early signs of COVID in various populations. We were involved in building crowdsourcing tools to understand symptoms and health care seeking behavior. We published a landmark paper on the value of mask wearing. And recently we launched Vaccine Finder in collaboration with CDC, which is all about matching people with vaccine supplies in the community.
Something that’s worth highlighting are the collaborations we’ve had with private and public organizations across the board. We’ve partnered of course with several different academic institutions, but we've also worked with big tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple, and government agencies like CDC, HHS, and the White House. It's been all hands on deck across all sectors, and it's exciting to see our work having some degree of impact on the course of this pandemic. Hopefully we're approaching the end of the tunnel now.
Scott: It sure feels like the average person is far more well-versed in infectious diseases now than they were a year ago. Do you think that COVID-19 is going to create lasting changes in how we think about future pandemics as a society?
John: I hope so. I hope that we continue to think about the risk of future pandemics and develop tools and infrastructure to be better prepared for the next one. I think we've become a little bit more knowledgeable about infectious disease and basic hygiene over the past year. Perhaps mask wearing will become something more socially acceptable like it is in other parts of the globe, where you might wear a mask during flu season to protect others or yourself, but it’s hard to say whether these changes will last.
Scott: Right, that makes a lot of sense. Before we wrap up, I wanted to end with a more open-ended question. Given what you’re seeing in the space, what are you most excited about when it comes to digital health and the intersection of technology and healthcare?
John: I don't think there's just one thing. I think the pandemic exposed a lot of opportunities in digital health, and we’re finally seeing a shift towards things like telemedicine, remote patient monitoring, and AI technologies. A lot of these innovations were simply waiting in the wings before and didn’t have a chance to shine, but there’s been a big push the past year that has demonstrated the value of these tools to providers and patients. Now that the cat is out of the bag, now that we have a huge amount of enthusiasm and acceptance across the ecosystem, it’s all about what we can build from here.
Scott: It certainly feels like we’ve compressed a decade of digital health adoption into a single year, which is an exciting prospect for the space. Thanks again for your time John, and for providing your perspectives on the future of tech and healthcare.