Bump and update -- I've done a poor job keeping the 'ole blog up, but did hear yesterday that a friend of ours has legislation pending in Colorado which would provide for remote diagnostic and medical assistance for Medicaid (I think) patients... that echoes much of what Haseltine was talking about from SouthEast India in the earlier post below....

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I had the good fortune to listen to William Haseltine chat for awhile at this year's PC Forum in Carlsbad (note; La Costa needs some renovating...)

PC Forum is the always-idiosyncratic conversation mediated by Esther Dyson. This year's theme was Erosion of Power: Users in Charge. Particularly interesting around topics like personal health records...

Haseltine has founded seven biotech companies, the most well-known of which (to the general public) is probably Human Genome Sciences. He's also been behind another 20 or so biotech start-ups, including Medimmune.

He talked about two ideas I found particularly compelling:

1. A distributed, outsourced venture model for global R&D for pharma.

Imagine a global pharmaceutical IdeaLabs...

I heard this as a way to much more efficiently allocate big pharma's R&D capital by taking advantage of the right labor cost and expertise worldwide up and down the R&D chain. But not all owned by a single monolith.

The statistics on declining R&D productivity for big pharma over the last few decades were ... alarming...

2. Southeastern Indian 'social entrepreneur' models for low cost/high quality provision of health care. (Note; this is different from the cut-rate, and thriving, foreign-patient business in India)

Haseltine talked about those models depending in part on a (U.S. Army-like) large cadre of high-school educated functional specialists for health care ... vs. much higher-cost caregivers. And, a widely allocated (geographically) distribution of health care expertise ... "Doc-in-a-box"...

Haseltine foresees China ultimately confronting its own woeful health care with this sort of model ... and believes the U.S. could too, though entrenched interest agin' it are strong, here.

But can't you imagine training a next-generation of doctors to be social entrepreneurs here in the U.S.?

Can't imagine that path would be any more stressful than the corroding uncertain careers most face otherwise ... and there's always been that moral root to the profession...