Jason Hwang Speaker Biography
Authority on Innovative Health Care Reform and Co-Author of “The Innovator’s Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care”
Jason Hwang, M.D., M.B.A. is an internal medicine physician who is co-founder and chief medical officer of Icebreaker Health (Lemonaid Health), a California-based health care startup that is transforming primary care by delivering services via smartphone app. As a speaker, he blends his medical experience, business education, and technological advances, showcasing the exciting range of innovation occurring in the health care industry today along with a sneak peak of what will be possible tomorrow.
Innosight Institute
Dr. Hwang previously co-founded and was the Executive Director of Healthcare at Innosight Institute (now renamed the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation), a non-profit social innovation think tank that is driving the reinvention of the health care industry, making it more accessible and user-friendly. Dr. Hwang coauthored The Innovator’s Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Healthcare with Professor Clayton M. Christensen of Harvard Business School and the late Jerome H. Grossman of Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
Disruptive Innovation
Dr. Jason Hwang shares his groundbreaking research into disruptive innovation, which has transformed many industries and can do the same for health care. He describes how new medical technologies have fueled the transition from intuitive to precision medicine, allowing previously complex disorders to be diagnosed precisely and treated with predictably effective therapies.
Healthcare Innovation
When these innovations are integrated into new business systems, they will spearhead vital reforms in the healthcare industry, offering solutions to the core problems currently crippling the nation?s healthcare system: skyrocketing costs and the lack of access to quality medical care.
Education
Dr. Hwang taught as chief resident and clinical instructor at the University of California, Irvine, where he received multiple recognitions for his clinical work. He has also served as a clinician with the Southern California Kaiser Permanente Medical Group and the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Long Beach, California. Dr. Hwang received his B.S. and M.D. from the University of Michigan and his M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.
Jason Hwang Speaking Topics
The Innovator’s Prescription: How Disruptive Innovation Will Transform Health Care
In the absence of the ability to precisely define a disease, the care of patients is best undertaken by highly skilled professionals, whose intuition is based on deep experience. This describes the history of health care, and we call this the practice of intuitive medicine. Molecular biology holds the promise of transforming medical practice into a new phase that we call precision medicine. It promises to dramatically reduce cost and increase the predictable effectiveness of therapy.
Disrupting U.S. Health Care
When we think of “quality” health care, we generally assume that more expertise is always preferred -- doctors must be better than nurses, specialists must be better than primary care doctors, and hospitals and clinics must be better than virtual interactions. This mentality, in part, has left us with a health care system that is unaffordable, inconvenient and largely broken. But if we were to apply the principles of disruptive innovation to our collapsing health care system—by using advances in technology to help nurses and primary care physicians to do more sophisticated work—a costly, hard-to-schedule trip to the doctor may become increasingly rare. Disruptive innovations like direct-to-consumer diagnostics, patient-controlled electronic health records, telemedicine, and hospital-at-home models of care have the potential to create transformative change in the health care industry, argues physician Jason Hwang. Such models of care also have the potential to be superior options with distinct advantages for paving the way toward more accessible, affordable and quality health care.
Full Potential: Why and How Retail Clinics Must Disrupt… Again
Anointed as the disruptive model for care delivery when they first entered the marketplace, retail clinics have fallen significantly short of both their promise and potential. In fact, says Jason Hwang, they surprisingly did not follow the path of true disruption. Most disruptions start by serving the low end of consumers, but retail clinics tend to attract people who already have insurance and access to care. The retail clinic model has become one of convenience rather than one of need, missing an important opportunity to serve the poor and underinsured. To thrive and move beyond their current plateau, retail clinics must figure out how to self-disrupt, says Hwang – and he believes a combination of technology and nurses may be a big part of the solution. He discusses his views on how retails clinics can capitalize on mobile health technology and rely more on the expertise of nurses to further push the boundaries of where and to whom retail clinics deliver care, expanding their menu of services while providing quality care to those who need it most.
Realizing the Potential - The Next Generation of Telemedicine
Most health care takes place inside brick-and-mortar walls. Physician-patient visits are largely unstructured, 15-minute "conversations" with little engagement - highly variable experiences with highly variable outcomes that are also neither scalable nor efficient in an era of rising costs and workforce shortages. The advent of telemedicine brought high expectations of disruption, but physicians continue to adhere to the same care delivery model - just on a video screen. A new model of telemedicine offers the best potential to introduce enormous efficiency, standardizing workflows and care processes, and provide care that is not just affordable and convenient, but also high in quality and scalable. Dr. Jason Hwang is a pioneer of this next generation of telemedicine. He delves deep into the automated, software-based framework, and discusses proven outcomes, drawn from his own experiences. He also shares his vision for the future of telemedicine in which new models of care will arise in often unexpected ways, as new caregivers and care sites enabled by the digital tools that are being developed today.
Will Smartphones Replace Your Doctor? The Impact of Digital Health
Our population is living longer. There continues to be a shortage of nurses and primary care doctors. Provisions of the Affordable Care Act -- guaranteed issue and mandated coverage of many preventative services – have taken effect. The demand for affordable, quality health care is growing, and there is no way to fulfill it through existing models of care where every problem requires you to see a doctor, in person. Jason Hwang believes highly scalable digital health technologies are poised to vastly improve health care – for everyone. Drawing from experiences with his own telehealth start-up PolkaDoc, as well as his work with the X-PRIZE Foundation, Hwang talks about technology’s sophisticated yet affordable solutions that already exist – from ultrasounds and EKGs to diagnosing of ear infections or rashes, all via smartphones – and discusses the potential that simple digital innovations like text messaging, avatars and apps have for helping patients get better care, earlier and more efficiently. The value of digital health to transform health care is tremendous.
How Technology is Changing Health Care - for Good
Traditional health care is simply not set up to evolve alongside rapidly advancing technologies. Consider the influx of health data from wearable fitness devices and home diagnostic equipment. Doctors either don't know what do with the data, or they can't keep up with the data deluge. What's needed is a software solution that can absorb and process the data, supported by doctors who can then make both the sophisticated and regulatory-required decisions, says Dr. Jason Hwang. It already exists in what Dr. Hwang describes as an asynchronous, cloud-based platform. By moving more of the rote, routine care online - "automating the automatable" - it frees up capacity for doctors to focus on more complex care that genuinely requires their expertise. Dr. Hwang also explores the changing relationship between providers and patients, and explains why he believes digital health care will ultimately enhance doctor satisfaction and help eliminate doctor shortages.
Jason Hwang Books
The Innovator’s Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care
Purchase BookJason Hwang Videos
Jason Hwang Articles
Jason Hwang Speaker Testimonials
"We are very grateful for Jason’s contribution to our ‘Connect for Impact’ conference. He delivered an inspiring, thoughtful and tailor-made keynote which was highly appreciated by our guests. Besides that, Jason was also available for private conversations, reflecting on ideas, giving comments and advice!"
- | Noaber Foundation
"Your presentation on Innovation in Healthcare Service Delivery was exceptionally well received. You truly connected with our members who seek entrepreneurial leadership and are eager to advance behavioral healthcare "back home" and industry-wide. Thank you so much for an excellent presentation."
- | MHCA
"Jason is a rock star! We were so pleased with his presentation he set the tone for the rest of the conference. He is also one of the nicest people I've ever met."
- | University of Miami
