Trained as a physician-scientist and management consultant, Dr. Shaywitz has experience in clinical drug development and strategic and commercial planning. Dr. Shaywitz is co-founder of the Center for Assessment Technology and Continuous Health (CATCH), a Boston-based initiative to use improved real-world measurement to improve care and drive science. He also is co-founder of the Harvard PASTEUR program, a translational research initiative at Harvard Medical School, and a founding advisor of Sage Bionetworks, a non-for-profit medical research initiative focused on open innovation. He works at a biopharmaceutical company in San Francisco; the views expressed in his postings are his own and do not represent the views of his employer. Dr. Shaywitz is an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. His personal website is: http://davidshaywitz.wordpress.com.
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Mike Lacon/flickr Lowering Health Care Costs Is Hard Because Every Patient Is Unique
The value-based healthcare movement's effort to cut costs and improve healthcare outcomes doesn't realize that patients' conditions are rarely homogenous.
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Getting to the Right Relationship Between Doctors and Drug Companies
There is a way to cultivate, not demonize, collaboration between physicians and pharma.
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What Business Can Learn From Medicine
Question the intuitive "best" practice; never assume we know enough.
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Humanism in Digital Health: Do We Have to Sacrifice Personal Connections as We Improve Efficiency?
The human connection is threatened by a reductive focus on data collection, algorithms, and information transaction.
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A Database of All Medical Knowledge: Why Not?
Physicians won't become obsolete any time soon, but the comprehensive integration of everything we know about well-being could revolutionize medical care.
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Preserving American (Medical) Exceptionalism
America must recommit to U.S. medical culture's first principles.
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A Future We Make for Ourselves: Should We Expand Imperfect Treatments, or Create New Ones?
The Supreme Court's recent decision on health care exposes an age-old debate: focus resources on the treatments we have, or set our sights on pricey research for future cures?
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Is One Company About to Lock Up the Electronic Medical Records Market?
Will Silicon Valley lead health care's next revolution -- or miss it?
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Will Patients Bear the Burden for Developing Their Own Treatments?
Soon, you won't only be responsible for managing your disease -- you may also be expected to help find your own cure.
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Mission Critical: How Translation-Focused Disease Foundations May Save Medical Research
Successfully translating scientific discoveries requires a primal sense of urgency, which some disease foundations seem to have, and many big pharmas appear to need.
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Decoding Phenotype: The Holy Grail for Today's Medical Scientists
We've figured out DNA, but we need to start watching how it interacts with the environment.
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Balancing Disruptive Innovation and Incremental Progress in Medicine
The entrepreneur and process methods -- two ways of dealing with the problems created by a business segregated into extreme phenotypes
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What the Health-Care Industry Can Learn From Technology Start-Ups
In the development of drugs, it's too difficult to change things on the fly, and to rapidly pivot in response to an appreciation of customer need
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America's Healthy Infatuation With Entrepreneurs
At large, established companies, doing old things more efficiently becomes more important than doing new things. That's the problem.
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Are Doctors Becoming Obsolete?
The challenge for medicine is not only to utilize patient-focused technologies, but also to recognize the unquantifiable benefit that comes from a reassuring nod, a hand on the shoulder
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Design Can Improve Healthcare; Can It Also Lead to New Cures?
The kind of design thinking championed by Steve Jobs -- human-centered, iterative, and practical -- can fix more than just our gadgets
