- Business Insider just named30 young leaders who are working to transform healthcare.
- Among the honorees are a physicist tackling cancer, a lawyer who guides startups, and a pharmacist changing how patients are cared for.Click here to see the full list.
- We asked each of them for their best advice for people who want to disrupt healthcare. Read on to see what they told us.
- Click here for more BI Prime stories.
Business Insider just named the30 leaders under 40 who are working to transformUS healthcare.
The people on the list are an impressive group of executives, entrepreneurs, doctors, and scientists who are fighting to make the US healthcare system better for everyone. They’re using big data to fight diseases, bringing care to more people in innovative ways, and using cutting-edge technology to develop cures.
We asked each of them for their best advice for other young people who want to disrupt the US’s $3.5 trillion healthcare industry.
Here’s what they told us.
Clarrie Feinstein and Zachary Tracer contributed reporting.
‘Find a really good mentor with integrity.’
Blythe Adamson, the 34-year-old senior quantitative scientist at Flatiron Health, said that having a mentor with integrity can help young scientists navigate tricky situations.
“I think especially for those of us who are on the cutting edge, pioneering something new, we are constantly having to grow and use and have our biomedical research integrity challenged,” Adamson said.
Adamson’s mentor is Lou Garrison, a health economist and professor emeritus at the University of Washington.
Tackle a problem that you care about.
You should care deeply about the problem you choose to take on in healthcare, said Gil Addo, who co-founded medical-consult platform RubiconMD.
There are a couple reasons for that. For one, your passion will come through when you’re recruiting employees or pitching investors, helping you build a better team. Plus, you’ll be in this for the long haul.
“You have to be able to speak about this five to ten times a day for a decade-plus if you’re fortunate, so you’d better care about it, and that’d better come through,” said Addo, who’s 33.
Adds co-founder Carlos Reines, 34: “If you are in health tech, you have to be aware that things are not going to move at the same pace. You need to be patient.”
Build trust.
For many people in underrepresented communities, going into a clinic or treatment center full of affluent white people can be an alienating experience. What if you rely on food stamps, for example, and the doctor recommends a special diet filled with products you can’t find, let alone afford? What if you lack access to reliable transit, and your provider suggests you come back next week for a follow-up visit?
That’s why Toyin Ajayi, 38, and Iyah Romm, 35, cofoundedCityblock Health, a spin-out from Google parent company Alphabet. Their vision is a model of care that emphasizes preventive health and seeks to treat people in need with respect. To do that, you have to build trust, they told Business Insider.
“Put yourself in the shoes of a patient. Listen. Ask the questions other people haven’t asked. Follow up. Keep promises,” Ajayi said.
Part of building trust also means being okay with letting patients say no, Ajayi added. “Preserve people’s autonomy: let people decline services when they want to.”
‘Intentionally build relationships, even if you don’t understand how they’ll work for you now.’
Thinking back, Allison Baker, the 29-year-old director of nutrition at Kroger, is glad that early on in her work with the grocery store she reached out to leaders within the organizations to get to know them and let them know what she was interested in pursuing.
At the time, she hadn’t realized that a few years later she’d be turning to them for support, advice or approval. Building relationships across an organization is especially important for those building careers within large companies, she said.
“You just never know how things are going to change,” Baker said.
‘Dictate your destiny.’
When 36-year-old Ambar Bhattacharyya became the eighth employee at MinuteClinic, an urgent care startup that pharmacy chain CVS acquired in 2006, he noticed a small problem.
More often than not, the startup decided what city or state it’d enter next based on feedback from a large partner like Target or CVS. When one of those partners would open a string of stores in a new state, for example, it’d ask MinuteClinic to set up shop there as well.
“We didn’t dictate our destiny,” Bhattacharyya told Business Insider.
In practice, that didn’t work so well: some states had strict regulations around what physicians could and couldn’t do at a walk-in clinic, for example, meaning that trying to open a new site in certain areas was more trouble than it was worth.
So rather than catering to the desires of their corporate partners, Bhattacharyya decided, the startup should do its own due diligence and then expand to new locations based on where it made the most financial and practical sense for them.
“That decision to stick to our strategy, not CVS’s, is I think what led them to acquire us,” he said.
‘It’s impossible to do everything by yourself.’
Daniel Brillman, 35 and the CEO of a startup that connects healthcare and social services, has three key pieces of advice for young people trying to make a change in healthcare.
Brillman said the first is that you have to have a strong hypothesis if you want to bring about change in healthcare: an issue must be identified and a solution to the problem must be proposed.
In order to pursue your hypothesis, Brillman said it has to be backed up with drive and passion, because the healthcare industry is such a difficult space to navigate. Brillman said that passion and drive are important to help sustain motivation.
The most important piece of advice Brillman has for entrepreneurs in healthcare is to build a team with the “best people.”
As the CEO of Unite Us, Brillman learned early on that it’s impossible to do everything by yourself:
“You really have to build a team of people you trust. From an entrepreneurial perspective it’s really about getting the right people that can be part of the vision you’re trying to create.”
‘Follow your gut.’
Alexandra Broadus, the 35-year-old director of patient outcomes performance at Walgreens, started her career in pharmacy working as a pharmacy technician while still in high school. She’d planned to study journalism in college, but after working in the pharmacy, pursued pharmacy school instead.
Then, she had planned to pursue a residency, and later she thought she was going to be practicing pharmacy in a different way than she is right now.
At every step of the way, she had been presented with another career path that deviated from her initial plans. Instead, she listened to her gut.
“On each occasion my gut said, ‘No, do this instead,'” Broadus said.
When choosing companies, ‘go where you feel the spark.’
After earning a doctorate in neuroscience at Stanford, Emily Drabant Conley snagged a job at a new startup with just 30 employees called 23andMe.
Nearly a decade later, Conley, 37, is now a top leader at 23andMe, where she works to negotiate partnerships with big pharmaceutical companies in pursuit of new types of drugs.
She advises young people not to get caught up on titles or try to predict which young startups will be successful.
Instead, “go where you feel the spark,” Conley said. Observe “the spark and fire of the leadership of that company, and really track that.”
People don’t always weigh “the softer stuff,” like diversity or how women returning from maternity leave get treated, even though those are the things that end up mattering more, Conley added.
‘Become an expert in at least two’ of the forces transforming healthcare.
Paul Coyne says it’s vital for young people to “think about the broader picture of the forces that are at play” in the industry — and become an expert in at least two of them. That includes tech area of healthcare like IT, analytics and patient’s electronic health records.
Coyne, 33, is speaking from experience. A registered nurse who also leads a team of about 60 at the Hospital for Special Surgery, Coyne also oversees the hospital’s data science efforts around nursing and co-founded a health-tech startup called Inspiren.
In such a complex sector, “an understanding of all those is needed to really change and transform it,” he said. “And I think it’s very difficult to piece it all together, and everyone I think is looking at their own little part of it.”
Transcending that, Coyne said, takes a lot of time, as well as humility.
‘You have to work really hard and find a solution for an unmet need.’
Joshua DeFonzo, 39, is overseeing the strategy at Johnson & Johnson’s $3.4 billion surgical-robot startup, Auris Health, which was acquired by the pharma giant in April.
DeFonzo said he’s seeing how new technology can improve the lives of people who have previously not been able to get sufficient care.
“If you want to impact the health system you have to start with unmet need,” DeFonzo told Business Insider. “You need to be able to see where there is a population or community that is experiencing a problem, where there is no solution, yet.”
For DeFonzo, the key question to ask is, “how do I deliver the best value and address those needs?”
And importantly, once this goal is defined you have to be willing to work hard to get the work done.
‘Treat healthcare as a student of history.’
Sean Duffy, 35, cofounded a digital health startup calledOmada Health and currently serves as its CEO.
He told Business Insider that if he could give any newcomers to the space a piece of advice, it would be to “treat healthcare as a student of history,” because of its complicated and multifaceted nature.
Unlike in areas like computer science or bioengineering, many obstacles in healthcare don’t lend themselves to logical reasoning, said Duffy.
“You need patience for the way things have been done. There are some invaluable constraints, so the task at hand is to think creatively through them,” Duffy said.
‘Pursue the passions that are deep and personal.’
Chris Esguerra, 39, has long seen the community as an integral part of one’s health.
At Blue Shield of California Promise Health Plan, he and his team are putting that into action, redrawing the lines of traditional healthcare to help with social needs like food insecurity.
He advises young people to “pursue the passions that are deep and personal, because those are the ones that resonate the most, and those are the ones that motivate you the most.”
Having that internal compass helps you navigate “when something is fleeting or really a shiny object, but may not match ultimately to what you want to do,” he said.
Find people who share your passion for tackling a problem.
Mariya Filipova, the 35-year-old vice president of innovation at health insurer Anthem, said that it’s important to start with the choices you’re making as a patient or advocate, and then find something you’re passionate about. Finally, find the people who share in that passion.
“There’s no shortage of problems. What we have a shortage of is brave, daring leaders who would ask the question of ‘Why not?'” Filipova said.
‘There has to be something deep driving the commitment.’
Hadiyah-Nicole Green, 38, knows firsthand that the only way to make a difference in healthcare is to identify an issue that you’re passionate about, otherwise it will be difficult to feel motivated.
“Start with something that you’re passionate about, that matters to you,” said Green, a physicist and assistant professor at Morehouse School of Medicine.
Because Green’s aunt and uncle both died from cancer, discovering a new cancer treatment became her goal. And the aim of helping cure cancer resonated personally.
“You have to work really long hours and be very motivated,” Green said. “There has to be something deep driving the commitment.”
Career paths aren’t always ‘this absolutely preordained thing.’
Kristen Park Hopson didn’t always know what she wanted to do for a living.
Interests in finance and engineering at the start of college eventually led her to the science research space. After graduating, Hopson moved back home to her parents’ basement to explore the burgeoning interest further, as a research associate.
Today, the 39-year-old directs key cancer research at the fast-growing biotech Moderna. And Hopson said young people should also feel comfortable taking some time to think about their paths.
“I think the first thing is to feel okay about not having a direct line of sight to exactly what they want to do, and being okay with just exploring the space,” she said
Career talks often make one’s path sound “like it’s this absolutely preordained thing. And it isn’t always that way.”
Hopson also often advises mentees to learn about “what you don’t want to do” from their jobs, calling it as important as what you do like to do.
“At every fork in the road where you have a career choice to make, think about what brings you joy and where you want to make a difference,” Hopson said.
Avoid language that might make people feel excluded or unwelcome.
Shrenik Jain and Ravi Shah cofounded a platform calledMarigold Health that’s designed to help people with addiction recover by connecting them to a network of peers.
Because much of their work happens over text, Jain (23) and Shah (28) pay close attention to language, encouraging group moderators and participants to avoid using words that tend to make people feel unwelcome or excluded.
For example, while the word “patients” is frequently used across multiple healthcare fields, it can be considered demeaning to someone who’s working to recover from addiction. Jain recommends that anyone who’s entering the healthcare field keep this in mind to avoid confusing or excluding people.
“If you ask questions just as they appear in your head, you’re going to distract the person you’re asking and they’re going to answer a different question,” Jain told Business Insider. “Structure your question in a way that they’ll understand it in their own language.”
‘Try to think about the need.’
Christos Kyratsous, the 38-year-old vice president of research for infectious diseases and viral vector technologies at Regeneron, said it’s key to think through the need. That is keeping in focus the goal to improve human health.
“At the end of the day the reason we do what we do is to help people, and so by doing your best to develop technologies or develop therapeutics that are going to help people and work in areas where medical need exists is how you will eventually develop your own career,” Kyratsous said. “The reason why we do what we do is to improve the health of people. Our career and improving health go hand in hand.”
Don’t reinvent the wheel.
As the chief technology officer ofprimary care clinic operator One Medical, 33-year-old Kimber Lockhart advises against trying to create a new piece of the healthcare system from scratch.
Part of the reason is that in the US, healthcare is complicated.
“You have to understand all the stakeholders: the ecosystem of the buyer, the decision-maker, and the constraints that cause one person to choose one system over another,” Lockhart told Business Insider.
As a result, attempting to overhaul something that’s been used for decades is a feat that’s unlikely to succeed, she said.
“When someone says they want to design a better EHR [short for electronic health record], for example, I’ll say, ‘Is there a part of the EHR that you can make better? Is there an add-on to the EHR that would solve for a particular scenario?’ Starting with a slightly smaller scope rather than trying to reinvent the wheel is a good place to start.”
‘Think growth-oriented.’
Aziz Nazha, the 35-year-old director of the Cleveland Clinic Center of Clinical Artificial Intelligence, advises young people just starting out in healthcare to focus on growth instead of goals.
That’s because always being focused on chasing a goal can lead to burning out, Nazha said. Instead, the doctor advises focusing on how you can grow and expand your knowledge to respond to problems or frustrations.
For instance, Nazha hopes to use AI technology to better advise patients on which chemotherapy will work best for them, something that came up as part of his daily work as a hematologist and medical oncologist.
“It’s really easy to think linear, especially in academia. You do this, and this is the path,” he sayid But new and disruptive tech is changing society so much that you have to “think not just out of the box — completely out of the box.”
‘At the end of the day, even people with good motivations can make mistakes.’
Toward the end of medical school, Vinay Prasad discovered a passion for research while studying the use of mammograms for older women.
Prasad had assumed the cancer screening was a “sure bet.” But studies he read led the physician-in-training to think that “the evidence wasn’t as strong as had been said.”
Prasad, 36, works today to ensure that rigorous data back up the treatments that patients are offered and get in the US. His advice for young people in healthcare stems from both that work and his early career experiences.
One: find what you’re passionate about. Two: data matters.
“At the end of the day, even people with good motivations can make mistakes,” he said. Data and evidence help you be a more effective advocate.
And lastly, “be brave,” Prasad said. “Anyone is free to comment about something you think is wrong.”
Get perspective across the industry.
Angela Profeta, the 37-year-old chief strategy officer at CityMD, often gives the students in her classes at Columbia University the advice of getting the perspectives of companies across the market.
That is, understand what role doctors, health insurers, drugmakers, and policymakers each play in the industry.
If you can get experience in multiple areas, it can be valuable for understanding problems in ways that leaders with expertise in one area might not be able to see, she said.
‘Solve problems for other people, not for yourself.’
Andrew Schutzbank, 37, oversees the growth of Iora Health, managing teams across eight states and implementing new technologies to deliver better patient care.
Before working at Iora Health, which is changing the way primary care operates, he learned valuable lessons that focused the goals in his career.
“After going to med school I realized an important lesson early on,” Schutzbank said. “Doctors often spend too much time solving other doctor problems, instead of patient problems, and it’s totally the wrong approach.”
While Schutzbank says it might seem obvious in the healthcare profession to put the patient first, that is not how the healthcare system is designed.
“I often see young people diving into healthcare wanting to solver their own problems. Solve problems for other people and not for yourself,” he said.
‘You need to have quite a bit of patience.’
Emily Silgard, 36, has realized that patience is the best skill to have when working in healthcare.
“You need to have quite a bit of patience because healthcare involves many complicated systems that take time to advance in the way you want them to,” Silgard said.
Silgard, a data science manager and team lead at theFred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center has seen how complicated working in healthcare has become. That’s understandable, because the stakes are extremely high when dealing with peoples’ lives, she said. Still, the industry is risk-averse.
“It can be frustrating to work within this space and move along your research in a meaningful way,” Silgard said. “Having patience is key, but that shouldn’t stop you to think big and keep moving forward.”
‘Follow the money.’
Ariane Tschumi, now the general counsel at healthcare startup Galileo, got interested in healthcare while working in Aceh, Indonesia, to help people recover from the 2004 tsunami.
Ultimately, Tschumi, who’s 35, decided that to help transform healthcare she needed a better understanding of the laws and regulations that shape it in the US. After getting her undergraduate degree at Harvard, she went on to get a law degrees there, then worked on healthcare-innovation policy in the Obama administration.
Her advice is that people trying to disrupt healthcare need to develop a deep understanding of the system first.
“You need to follow the money in the complex web of actors to identify how you innovate,” she said.
And people should make sure they’re working to move the system in the right direction.
“Focus on really aligning the incentives,” she said. “What’s motivated me throughout my career in healthcare has been my belief that we can make healthcare both higher quality and lower cost.”
Be resilient.
Sara Vaezy, the 36-year-old chief digital strategy officer for Providence St. Joseph Health imparted four pieces of career advice to those looking to make a difference in the healthcare industry.
The first: Have resilience going into it. It’s not going to be easy, and you’re going to hit challenges as you work to transform healthcare.
“There will be inertia working against you and them and me and all of us. It’s important to remember that and not get discouraged,” Vaezy said.
Next, try different things.
Vaezy said she doesn’t think about her career in 10-20 year timeframes. Instead, she asks herself how she could best spend her next three to five years. Otherwise, you run the risk of getting locked in.
“The market is changing so much, the world is changing so much. 10 years ago we weren’t anticipating that Amazon and Google and Apple would be in healthcare,” Vaezy said.
Limiting to one career course guiding a decade could limit career possibilities.
Also: Keep an ultimate focus.
“Remembering, ‘I’m here to help people, I’m here to serve.’ it helps power through when things get tough and they get tough really often,” Vaezy said.
Finally, “Get in there.” There’s nothing more important than experiences, and it’s easier to do that once you get your hands dirty by working directly in the industry, she said.
“All of my experiences, nothing has been more valuable than actually being in a healthcare setting and seeing what it’s like to get things done in healthcare,” Vaezy said.
Learn how to handle the reality that you’ll have to say no.
Sara Wajnberg, the 36-year-old chief product officer at Oscar Health, has learned through her career building out the health insurance startup’s tech product that there is a lot out there that you could spend time working on. But if you want to be successful, you can’t say yes to all of it.
“That’s a hard position to be in,” Wajnberg said.
It’s important to nail down how you should invest your time. Figuring that out and building relationships across organizations can help you with a career in healthcare products in particular.
‘Show up on time.’
Ben Wanamaker, the 37-year-old head of consumer technology and services at Aetna, shared three pieces of advice.
The first: “Show up on time.”
“I’m continually shocked at how often people at every stage in their career don’t show up and don’t show up on time,” he said.
Next, be sure to get into the ugly parts of the business.
“Don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty on the really ugly parts of healthcare,” Wanamaker said. That is, learn about billing and reimbursement, or how an insurance network works.
Lastly: “Listen louder to behavior than you do to work,” Wanamaker said.
Everyone in the healthcare industry tends to say the same things and have the same goals. At the same time, healthcare costs are still going up, so it’s important to tune into what’s actually going to have an impact, he said.
‘Speak louder.’
As a petite woman, Kaja Wasik, the 35-year-old cofounder and chief science officer of a startup called Variant Bio, is used to being overlooked. Oftentimes when she meets potential business partners or investors for the first time, they assume she is an assistant or a secretary.
“I’ll never be a white man in a suit,” Wasik told Business Insider.
So to get around other people’s prejudice and have her voice heard, she’s developed some strategies.
She speaks louder, for example. “I don’t let people speak over me. I express my opinions as much as I can, just to be heard,” Wasik said.
Wasik also adopts a serious tone that’s appropriate to the work she’s doing, which involves drug development based on diverse genomic datasets. “You have to step in and sound much more serious, because otherwise you won’t be treated seriously.”
‘It’s required of you to take risk.’
Jonathon Whitton, 36, is working on developing hearing loss treatments at Decibel Therapeutics. The field is relatively new and for Whitton, every discovery in this space involves taking risk, because much of what he is working on has never been done before.
But for most young people wanting to make a change a healthcare, Whitton says that no matter the subject area, taking risk is neccessary to create new solutions.
“I think if you’re going to make a change in healthcare, it’s required of you to take risk because by definition you’re proposing a different direction from the norm,” Whitton said.
“You have to create new methodology and technologies that no one is thinking about to address a need,” he said.
Instead of providing answers, learn to facilitate discussion.
Early in your career, develop skills that “help people think better or approach problems differently, instead of merely offering opinions or telling people what to do,” advises Gerren Wilson.
“I used to be the champion of providing answers and now realize that I’m way more effective when I facilitate discussion or pose questions that help others arrive at solutions,” Wilson said.
As head of patient partnerships at Roche’s Genentech, the 38-year-old works to get more diverse groups of patients involved in the pharmaceutical company’s research.
In that work, he’s put this philosophy into practice by convening groups, faciliating discussions, and creating solutions in partnerships with other stakeholders — and it’s “really helped establish buy in, build consensus and gain traction that lasted,” according to Wilson.
“Advancing inclusive research is largely about meeting people where they are, inspiring action not admiration, and collaborating towards distinct ends,” he said. “I’ve been mindful of how I bring people along and constantly leverage refined collaboration skills really advance my work and professional reputation.”
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