Making Connections #2: The Wave of Change in Healthcare
Why evolving incentives will be the catalyst for digital health adoption
I am starting this newsletter to have more open, meaningful conversations about psychology, sociology, company-building and capital allocation. I'd love to hear your feedback: hit reply and let's start a conversation.
Evolving incentives in Healthcare
Behaviour change is hard. Behaviour change when people's lives are at stake is exponentially harder.
Which is why it has been so tough for startups to break into healthcare. Everything is against them - the regulatory hurdles, the complex reimbursement pathways, and doctors whose only experience of technology involves EMRs adding hours of data input to their already long days.
But the spiralling cost of healthcare demands a radical change. Governments are responding by rethinking incentives — evolving the reimbursement model from activity-based metrics to reimbursing the effectiveness of care.
When incentives to improve value for money combine with technological advances enabling care delivery at a lower cost, the opportunity arises for startups to finally penetrate the healthcare sector in a meaningful way.
Read my article here on the emerging wave of change that could prove the turning point for digital health startups.
Online Reading
The Coolest Architecture on Earth Is in Antarctica
Countries are competing to build the most beautiful research stations in Antarctica.
Making a Movement: Narratives and Creation Spaces
"Narratives provide the context and shared purpose that pull others into the movement and keep them motivated and focused as they encounter and deal with the myriad of unexpected obstacles standing in the way of meaningful change. Creation spaces provide an environment that encourages and supports local initiative in collaboration with others while also providing a much richer set of resources that these local groups can draw on, and learn from, as they mount their local initiatives."
Momentum Isn’t Magic—Vindicating the Hot Hand with the Mathematics of Streaks
As part of the wider replication crisis, academics are starting to question many of the Tversky/Kahneman conclusions — it turns out there is such thing as being 'on a roll'.
Letter to a friend who may start a new investment platform
Relevant to anyone considering starting a company.
Books
Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson
I love hearing stories from people with niche passions. They're not engaged in status games, they're deeply committed to a pursuit that holds very little interest to the outside world.
Shadow Divers recounts the indefatigable commitment of a group of divers to uncovering the origins of a U-boat they discovered off the east coast of the US. A classic example of truth is stranger than fiction.
It's also a reminder that the history we read is often subjective. At university, I studied historiography — investigating the impact of the author on how history is written. While some historians see politics and war as the events that shape the world, championing 'great men', others highlight the underlying social, cultural and scientific forces that made change inevitable.
Once you've read 10 different accounts of the same period of history, all of which argue a different reason why events played out the way they did, and some in which the 'facts' directly contradict each other, you know to read any account of the past with a healthy degree of scepticism.
Podcasts
The Secrets of our Success by Joseph Henrich - LSE Public Lectures
Henrich is a professor of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard and discusses the biological foundations of cultural evolution. He explains how the secret of human success is not our intelligence, but our accumulated body of knowledge. Humans think as groups - it’s the interaction of people over time that allows us to progress. Larger and more interconnected groups generate faster adaptive processes and produce increased technological sophistication.
Let's Connect
In Real Life:
On Deck Sydney is all booked up for Wednesday, but we’ll be hosting more dinners in coming months and the next one is in Melbourne in February. Apply to join us.
At AirTree, we’re looking to host sector-focussed dinners over the next few months - which sectors should we focus on?
Email me back
I would love to hear your thoughts on value-based care, digital health and where you think Australia can lead the world.
Header image credit: Photo by Jordan Donaldson | @jordi.d on Unsplash