AUGUST 21,
2018
Dr. Maulik
Majmudar has spent years toiling on a task Amazon must master to disrupt the nation’s health care industry:
getting physicians to incorporate novel technologies into their practics.
This
week, he announced he is taking a new job with the ecommerce giant following
several years incubating new technologies at Massachusetts General Hospital.
In an
interview with STAT Monday, Majmudar, the former associate director of the
health care transformation lab at Mass. General, said the job at Amazon offers
a chance to drive the uptake of technology solutions that could impact patients
worldwide.
We
manufacture prescription opioids. And we want to limit their use.
The
AMA's Opioid Task Force Progress Report highlights changes in clinical practice
— including a decrease in the number of opioid prescriptions and an increase in
PDMP usage.
“The thing that truly attracted me was the
opportunity to work with really meaningful products and services at the scale
and scope Amazon has” around the world, Majmudar said in the interview. “There
is an incredible amount of opportunity to bring into practice existing
technology and digital tools that actually improve the experience and health
and wellness of patients.”
Majmudar,
who practiced cardiology until taking this job, declined to discuss his precise
role at Amazon, but said he is working directly for the company, not the joint venture company being led by Dr. Atul Gawande.
Amazon is working on an array of initiatives to build its health care business,
including the use of artificial intelligence tools such as Alexa to make care
more efficient and cheaper. It also recently acquired the online pharmacy PillPack as part of an
attempt to upend the nation’s prescription drug business and is growing a unit
focused on selling supplies to hospitals.
Majmudar
has spurred the development of an array of technology products at Mass.
General. He helped create a contest to drive innovation called the Ether Dome
Challenge, which takes its name from the invention of surgical anesthesia at the
hospital in the 1840s. The contest has generated a wide array of inventions, including a text messaging app to
notify patients when they’re running behind, videos on atrial fibrillation that
can be watched from mobile devices, and virtual tours to help patients
understand the process and purpose of MRIs before undergoing their procedures,
among many other products.
“At the innovation lab, we were all about the
last mile — dealing with the implementation barriers,” Majmudar said. “You can
have all the invention you want. But if you can’t actually implement and deploy
it at scale and sustain it, it really is not going to have the impact that you
anticipate.”
That
describes the primary challenge facing Amazon and other technology companies as
they seek to use data and digitally enabled products to upend medicine’s
traditional practices and business models.
One
colleague said Majmudar’s understanding of the cultural and business factors
that often impede medical innovation makes him ideally suited for his new job.
“He’s trained clinically and can think like an MBA and an entrepreneur as
well,” said Zen Chu, a health care professor at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology’s Sloan School of Management. “He’s going to have a million ideas
whipping past him from inside Amazon and outside, and he’s got the pattern
recognition to figure out what is both clinically right and a good business as
well.”
Chu and
Majmudar co-authored an article for Fortune
discussing the power of Apple’s research kit to change clinical practice by
making it easier for physicians to gather and analyze sensor data and other
information.
“This is
the most exciting time in history for health technology to improve lives around
the world, and the smartphone is a core enabler for health communication,
education, monitoring, and telemedicine,” they wrote. “New technologies and
services are extending this impact into diagnosis and simple therapeutic
interventions.”
While he
has successfully incubated tech inventions at Mass. General, Majmudar has also
encountered barriers in his effort to implement mobile technologies. He served
as a founder and chief clinical officer of Quanttus, which struggled with
delays and technical challenges developing a wrist-worn device to monitor blood
pressure.
After
spending years and millions of dollars on that effort, it released an iPhone
app for tracking blood pressure measurements that fell short of initial
expectations, according to an article in MIT Technology Review,
which reported the company struggled to solve accuracy problems related to the
wrist-worn product.
But the
challenges faced at Quanttus — gaining enough capital to bring a product to
scale in a defined time frame — will be different from the ones he faces at
Amazon, which has plenty of time and money to invest in changing health care.
“Putting
innovations into practice is the part that gets me really excited,” Majmudar
said, adding: “Even existing tools are rarely being utilized at their maximum
potential, so how can we even just start with that, get adoption, get
distributions … and drive behavior change not necessarily from the patient
side, but from the provider side to actually deploy and adopt these tools? For
me, it’s the right time to be part of that.”
https://www.statnews.com/2018/08/21/amazon-majmudar-technology-clinic/?utm_campaign=rss&itx[idio]=8812325&ito=792&itq=a893c100-e85b-49f7-9ef0-5b4dd7a14729
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