Why this digital MD still practices in-person medicine

It’s 6:00 a.m. and I am already up finishing yesterday’s charts before I head to UCSF for my day on call.  If I were a “regular” doctor, this would be a pretty typical day in the US healthcare system. But I am not a typical physician (if that’s even a thing anyway).  I am an executive at a digital care company and yet just like any other doctor, I am up before dawn battling our broken system and hoping for something better. The difference between me and others is that sometime after lunch I get to plug back into my bubble of innovation across town and continue to dream big of how we can make things better.  And I am so grateful for that privilege.

As the years passed since I left my administrative role at UCSF, I scaled back my clinical time from 1 clinic a week to now only a few weeks of call per year.  And with increasing responsibilities at Omada Health, it’s becoming harder and harder to carve out the time.  When I meet other Chief Medical Officers who work in industry, they are usually surprised to find out that I still take call for all the obvious reasons - travel, competing priorities, and personal bandwidth.

In the hospital today I see so many opportunities for innovation.  A patient who had to call four therapists before they found one with openings - and that was for self-pay!  Another whose mail order pharmacy refill was delayed. Two hours spent playing telephone tag with a referring provider to give them an update on their patient.  And finally, my employee ID card which only works on half the readers because they updated the system and it has bugs. But I also see great signs of progress such as robots delivering medications and meal trays to my patients.  I am so excited to see everyone using Voalte Me vs. pagers.  And even cooler to watch my patients set goals and review their team members on OneView.  

As I ride the train back to Omada at 2 p.m., my head is filled with fresh ideas and insights.  I find myself in a product meeting today pushing for a feature that addresses mental health access with renewed energy given my patient’s experience that morning.  I am so thankful to UCSF and Omada for allowing me to bridge these two worlds and see how each inform the other. For digital health companies to continue to innovate and sell within healthcare, we need a tether to traditional care to stay up to date on where the pain points and gaps continue to be.  It’s easy for us to opine on how healthcare could be better, but unless we are still in contact with real patients in a real-word setting, we are innovating within a vacuum.

It’s now 10:00 p.m. and it’s time to sign discharge summaries after my kids are tucked in.  If I was still full-time at UCSF I might feel burned out by a day that started at 6 and may end at 11 p.m.  But instead I am content with the knowledge that I have an outlet for change and that ever so slowly ... we are innovating.