Irving Wladawsky-Berger

Reflections on Smarter Healthcare Systems: Practical, Concrete, Expert Advice

On October 1 and 2 IBM held its second global Smarter Cities conference in New York City.  I subsequently wrote about the excellent talk, Great Expectations for US Healthcare, given by Dr. Denis Cortese, CEO and President of the Mayo Clinic on the first day of the conference.

The next day, there were break-out discussions in six key areas relevant to building a smarter city: transportation, education, public safety, energy and utilities, government services and healthcare.  I was co-moderator of the healthcare session, along with Dan Pelino, IBM’s General Manager of Healthcare and Life Sciences.  Our panel of experts included Dr. Cortese; Chris Coburn - Executive Director of Innovations at the Cleveland Clinic; Dr. Ronald Paulus - Chief Technology and Innovation Officer at the Geisinger Health System;  and Dr. Armando Ahued Ortega - Health Secretary of Mexico City.  Let me summarize their practical and concrete remarks.

Innovation, Entrepreneurship and the Evolution of Cities

Why is it that only a few cities and regions around the world have become successful innovation hubs, even though many have tried?  For the last few years I have been intrigued by this question. 

Silicon Valley and the Boston-Cambridge area are among the most prominent such innovation hubs in the world.  Their leading positions as technology-based innovation centers have been near impossible to replicate.  Others have tried to become the Next Silicon Valley.  A few of these efforts have achieved modest success, but most have fallen short of their goals.

Why is it so difficult?  The reasons are varied.  The prominence of Silicon Valley and the Boston-Cambridge area is closely related to the great engineering universities in their midst – Stanford and UC Berkeley, and MIT, respectively.  It clearly takes quite a long time to build such world class universities. 

Even harder to replicate is the entrepreneurial culture of these universities.  They strive to bring innovations to market by partnering with the private sector, including VCs to help them start new companies and established enterprises to jointly develop and commercialize new ideas.  Many other top universities have a more ivory tower culture that causes them to be suspicious of anything having to do with commerce.

Designing a Smart Healthcare System

On October 1 and 2 IBM held its second global Smarter Cities conference in New York City.  The first such conference was held in Berlin this past June, and the third will be held in Shanghai next year.

As was the case with Berlin, the New York Smarter Cities event had a very impressive agenda.  It included talks by IBM Chairman and CEO Sam Palmisano, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, and Melody Barnes, Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council.  The agenda also included panels with governors, mayors, and leaders of cultural institutions. 

In addition, there were break-out discussions to enable participants to share their experiences on what it takes to build a smarter city in six key areas: transportation, education, public safety, energy and utilities, government services and healthcare.  I helped organize and moderated the healthcare session.  Our panel included Denis Cortese - CEO and President of the Mayo Clinic; Ronald Paulus - Chief Technology and Innovation Officer at the Geisinger Health System; Chris Coburn - Executive Director of Innovations at the Cleveland Clinic; and Armando Ahued Ortega - Health Secretary of Mexico City.

Reflections on Economics from a Non-Economist

I have only been seriously interested in economics for the past two years - despite having been a student, majoring in physics, at the University of Chicago for most of the 1960s, - the home of the Chicago School, one of the most influential schools of economics in the world over the last sixty years.

My new interest was sparked in part by the work I have been doing over the past few years on complex systems, especially in market-facing complex systems involving people and services; and in part by my attempts to understand the underlying causes of the global financial crisis, the worst since the Great Depression.

What caused the crisis?  There are clearly no simple answers.  There is plenty of blame to go around.  But, while not condoning it, it is not difficult to understand the greed, temptations and short-term pressures of those in the financial industry, as well as the anti-government ideology of regulators and government officials over the last few decades.  But I have higher expectations from the research and academic communities, and continue to ask myself how so many of our best and brightest, including a number of Nobel Prize winners, could have failed to anticipate a crisis of this magnitude.

Then a few weeks ago I read an excellent article by Paul Krugman in the NY Times Magazine, “How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?,” that directly addresses this question.  In the article’s tag line, Krugman writes: “The Great Recession was the result not only of lax regulation in Washington and reckless risk-taking on Wall Street but also of faulty theorizing in academia.  Can economists learn from their mistakes?”