Improving healthcare through better use of digital innovation
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Crowdsourcing to Improve Digital Health Experiences with Denise Silber, Founder at Doctors 2.0 & U was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the latest audio-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors. Sonix is the best way to convert your audio to text in 2019.
Welcome to the Outcomes Rocket podcast, where we inspire collaborative thinking, improved outcomes and business success with today’s most successful and inspiring health care leaders and influencers. And now your host, Saul Marquez.
Saul Marquez:
Welcome back to the podcast. Today, I had the privilege of hosting Denise Silber. She is the CEO of Doctors 2.0 & U. Driven by a passion to improve healthcare through better use of digital innovation. Denise, founder and president of Basil Strategies and of the Doctors 2.0, a new conference series has a deep vision and understanding of the opportunities and challenges of digital health with 20 plus years of experience. She’s a global thought leader and social media influencer based in Paris. Denise contributes her unique experience as both a strategic digital health consultant and coach and marketing communication, and as a digital health keynote speaker, emcee and conference curator, multicultural and multilingual. Denise was one of the rare Americans to receive the Legion of Honor from the French government for her work in international e-health. She deploys her skills in strategy, communication, events, training and writing to help digital projects push forward. If there’s anybody that can help push your project forward, it’s Denise. And so it’s a true pleasure to have her here on the podcast with us. And with that, I want to go ahead and open the mike to you. Denise, welcome.
Denise Silber:
Well, thank you so much. It was really lovely if you to seek me out for this interview and I’m looking forward to it.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah, me too, Denise, did did I leave anything out of your intro that you want to share with the listeners about you?
Denise Silber:
I think that was already quite nice. So let’s just hop into it. Thank you for the opportunity.
Saul Marquez:
That sounds good. So why did you decide to get into the health care sector?
Denise Silber:
So it was a combination of wanting to and finding the right opportunity at a right moment. Few people know that very early on as a teen, I was considering becoming a doctor. And then I went to an open house in a hospital and realized that I didn’t think I would have the stamina and strength to be surrounded by people with at the time what I perceived as such suffering and vulnerability. And later, when I was at a couple of times in my life, my first job after college was with the U.S. Foreign Service. And I was put in a public health position visiting rural medical centers and city hospitals. I was very interested in trying to help from a policy standpoint. And then when I was getting my MBA, one of the offers I received was to go to work for a leading pharmaceutical company. And I thought, well, this is it. This is my opportunity to observe a little bit more closely what’s going on in the health care system.
Saul Marquez:
Wow. So it’s like one thing after another, whether it be through a hospital or at a pharma company. You just sort of kept this health care thing just kept popping up in your life.
Denise Silber:
Yes.
Saul Marquez:
It was unavoidable.
Denise Silber:
Yes. Well, I think it pops up in in everyone’s life, although perhaps in mine a bit more as a child, because there were in the previous generation and the generation before the presence of physicians in part of my side of my family. And these people were looked upon as heroes from the other side.
Saul Marquez:
Now, that makes a lot of sense. And so you took the opportunity. And fast forward to today. Wow. I mean, you’ve done so many great things at this conference where you bring people together on this theme of, you know, just being digitally focused. What would you say a hot topic that needs to be on health leaders agendas today is and how are you guys thinking and approaching it?
Denise Silber:
Well, the hot topic would be the flexibility that leaders need to have in terms of planning for the future. In a world where I believe that the health system, the treatments in the health system would be structured in the same way. I just came back from the second edition of the virtual medicine conference. And when I see the enthusiasm and results for therapeutic virtual reality and as well the fact that in general the form of digital therapeutics is catching on and the use of digital for prevention, for prevention. Up until now has not been successful. And that all of these things take us out of as well, at least in part from the physical buildings, then I think I begin to see what I had hoped to see, which is that when people are thinking of the health care system, they think of simply bringing solutions to people with medical problems and not, well, I’ve got these hospitals and I’ve got these health care professionals, what am I going to do with them? That’s not the best perspective for how do we organize ourselves to provide the best health care to people.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah. And it’s happening. And I think now, more than ever, you have the use of of digital technologies, telemedicine, present, and I think it’s important that we focus on how do we stay focused on our core mission. Give us an example of either something you or or one of your clients has has gone through or done to achieve better outcomes or improve health care.
Denise Silber:
Well, I’m thinking of a study that was done by a hospital in Strasbourg, France with an artificial intelligence consulting company who is a partner. And this study was able to demonstrate in respect to mammograms. The usefulness of the mammogram in that with two populations who were observed retrospectively had not been in a study, but because they were able to use software that could gather data that was unstructured, that wasn’t even in a fish chiller. What you think of is the electronic medical record. But that could have been in notes or any other way. They were able to demonstrate that women who came in regularly for mammograms had better life expectancy than those who did not. That is certainly one way to not put an end to, but to bring a solid argument to the debate about whether we are excessively exposing people to extra rates and taking their time and creating an expensive. There is a debate about women and mammograms and…
Saul Marquez:
You feel that in the end the data showed that it is actually good and.
Denise Silber:
Right.
Saul Marquez:
The quality of life as well as I guess I have. The health span of an individual is better because of it.
Denise Silber:
And if we can say that, so I have two types of professional activity, although they’re very interrelated. One is the consulting on communications aspect of something and the other is making events for medical professionals better. So a second example of outcomes is the fact that I was an important part as the moderator of the patient panel at the virtual medicine conference, because there I was able to put the patients at ease so that people who are not ordinarily in the business of speaking to a professional audience. This was a CME accredited that were able to really explain how they had gone from pain or anxiety to a state of peacefulness and resolution of their problem through the use of virtual reality. So to me, that’s why I know that I’m repeating what I mentioned earlier is what should people be on the lookout for? But up until now, I think this is an important distinction. Digital has basically been putting information in the right place. The example that I gave about the mammogram, free mammograms is that case. The individual patient isn’t going to feel better because they took that mammogram. That was a demographic study that overall tells the public health policymakers what to do. But in this case, with virtual reality, it is the first time ever that a digital tool shows right directly to the mind and face of the patient how to feel better and right away. And they also know that after doing this for a while, they can actually get themselves into that state. It’s also a teaching tool.
Saul Marquez:
That’s there’s a lot of promise to that. And, you know, to your point, unlike the more traditional brick and mortar solutions, the VR set could be shipped to the patient at their own home and they could do it from their own home.
Denise Silber:
They absolutely are expected to. I mean, it might be a hospitalized patient because that was one of the cases as somebody who had massive pains due to irritable bowel syndrome or disease and who was hospitalized but then used it at home. Additionally, I don’t know if there have been studies using things like Google Cardboard or other very inexpensive tools. But it will work with that as well.
Saul Marquez:
That’s awesome. That’s fascinating. Have you ever put one of these on and experienced that yourself?
Denise Silber:
Absolutely. So several times. Unfortunately, I can’t say that I did it. Well, I’m glad I can say that I did not do it from a from a suffering from a medical standpoint. First one that I had tried was the glass elevator where I have a 360 viewpoint from inside the elevator. And depending on how fast you accelerate your head and the direction that you go. That’s what you see now. It so happens I am not I don’t get worried when I get into an elevator and one of those who tells it has the glass elevators. But I definitely felt that acceleration. I felt the exhilaration of it. I then also tried one, which was I’m a conference person. I go to events as well in order to bring exciting things to other to the more traditional medical conferences. So I went for a number of times to Games for Health Europe branch, which is often held in a cell in the Netherlands. And at that one I saw some of their games are are virtual. I had tried on one that had to do with physical therapy, where you would see shapes like shiny shapes on a dark background and you would have to move your gaze to shoot them down. By doing this, they would disappear. And that gives you physical therapy that is measurable, because when you tell somebody do this movement forty five times, they may not count. They may not count Right., but you can see it with a game method and the game would end when you’ve done your your dose. Well, right now at Cedars Sinai in Los Angeles, I also tried on one where you are in the body of the person with dementia with a form of dementia. And so you’re in your house and you’re seeing people come, but you’re sort of not seeing them right now. I don’t know how perfectly they imitate because they cannot be in the head of the demented person trying right to know. But it was a very distorted compared to how I see things, the sound and the view. We’re sort of coming in and out and we’re incomplete and a bit scary. So those are all different purposes. That was to train health care professionals on empathy, I guess.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah. Yeah. It’s very interesting. All these different applications and snake that you you’ve tried the different ones.
Denise Silber:
Oh, and I must say that I tried one at our own. It’s something I had organized where that particular model and this was a couple of years gone. I can’t remember exactly which model was was not for me. That was a model where there must have been a problem of delay between some way of what delay of what you see. It made me seasick right away and I took off. So they’re improving that. Yeah. So I’m always interested in seeing these.
Saul Marquez:
Super interesting. And you know I’m most interested. Thank you for sharing that. You know, the most interesting part is, gosh, the different applications for virtual reality. You walked us through an empathy with the Alzheimer patients.
Denise Silber:
Yeah. Oh, and I love the one where also the person can look down and see their avatars limb because this can the that limb can walk and then that can project to them that they can walk.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah. That feeling. Right. Wow. Yeah. That’s so interesting. I had a chance to do one was meditation and then just kind of placed me in a forest. It was really neat. And by the way, I was stressed before I did it. And I’m like, let me try this. And it really did relax me. And then the other one that I tried was a training. It was orthopedic training, how to use orthopedic surgery equipment. Fascinating stuff. The applications are plentiful. And folks like you probably are thinking, wow, you know, like, gosh, what else do they use this on? And that is a good question, because there’s a lot of things that VR is being used on. So I appreciate you bringing that to the conversation Denise.
Denise Silber:
Right. And I thought of something that might be fun that goes back to your earlier questions. But it’s in relation to this. You said, is there anything I haven’t said about you? I own a 3D version of myself that has to do with digital. Well, I was in Barcelona on a personal visit with friends when I walked past this 3D printing store and I said that it was full of tiny figurines and that people purchase of different size. So I stood on a pen. And so it turns out they took 4000 photos in like something like seven minutes. And I have this figurine. I just did it out of my digital curiosity. I wanted to see if this could really look like myself. But I talked with them and they produce ears for a local surgeon out of their own material, but it enables the surgeon to then make one out of the material that he needs to use to create an ear, for example, for a person who is missing one. I can imagine that it could as well give a new body sense to a person who feels off balance or whatever. I just wanted to the thrill of.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah, you know, it’s very interesting. So how big is the figurine?
Denise Silber:
Oh, maybe 5, 6 inches. It’s it’s very small. It’s very small. I’m a virtual kid. I wanted a Superman or Supergirl figurine.
Saul Marquez:
Now you have it. Did you put a little cape on it?
Denise Silber:
Not yet. But that’s a good idea.
Saul Marquez:
I love it. That’s really great. So, Denise, you’ve done some some really interesting work in your career. And with what you’re doing today, what would you say one thing that set back that you had that you learned a lot from that’s made you even stronger and better?
Denise Silber:
Well, I firmly believe that failure is always useful unless it’s a failure that puts an end totally to anything you could ever do again. I mean, physically, it whatever that there’s no way to start again. So it’s true that none of the failures really were a total setback. An example would be my initial relation to startups. I joined one of the earliest second opinion medical startups in the U.S. nearly 20 years. Twenty years ago ninety 1999. And we didn’t get to reach the milestones and get the financing that we needed. There it was the first internet bubble at the time, and it was so difficult because you had to really walk on eggs in relation to getting a second opinion. It was perceived as versus not with the original opinion floating the doctors ability in question, whereas these are very complex situations. And actually it’s more likely than not that you’d have as many opinions, at least variations based on the number of people that you would ask. So when that didn’t work out, I accepted another position with the very first surgical online community and that didn’t work out either. They also didn’t have their funding because it was too soon. So I learned from those experiences to be very wary of these great ideas because you need enough people. It’s a delicate balance between you don’t want to launch something that there are 50 million of them and this brings nothing. On the other hand, if you’re too soon, you won’t have enough supporters to make it viable. I have a certain distance with respect to founders of startups who could come across the saying this is a really amazing idea. It’s going to work. I’ve seen from the inside how things don’t necessarily work, even if they seemed logical.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah, I think that that’s a really great call out Denise and speaks to your experience. Every great idea is a great idea until it’s not. And it’s definitely great that you mentioned that something for the listeners to keep in mind. If you’re looking at something that seems exciting. You’ve got to really vet it out. What would you tell the listeners, Denise? How do you tell? You know, it may seem like a great idea, may seem logical, but what’s that thing that you see and say? That’s it. That’s not it.
Denise Silber:
Well, it depends on what market you’re after if you’re going to need. I mean, you would know this well with your day job. If you’re going after a market with reimbursement, then you have to wonder, and what timeline is this company or service going to get the proof it needs to submit to a regulatory authority? And can they last through that? That is a key question, because originally many digital inventors weren’t thinking of going down that regulatory path. And people realized that because health care functions big time based on reimbursement, you have to do that. And that may well be a question you can’t answer that you might need to show to people used to trials because they can say, well, you’re going to need X number of users in two groups to show a statistical difference. And you can start to wonder whether this service will show that.
Saul Marquez:
That’s a great call. What’s one of your proudest leadership experiences that you’ve had to date?
Denise Silber:
Overall, it was in creating a movement, and I would say I had the appreciation now through the events that that I’ve either created or assisted with and in particular giving patients a voice. So when I first launched Doctors 2.0, it was a standalone conference. Now it’s an embedded session in another conference. But back at the beginning of this decade, that is ending. It was very rare to have organized a conference where you would have several patients speaking and to treat them like a speaker, to have them to give them transport. To ask them for their biography, their photo, to give them a keynote position. And they all. If I were to ask them but most spontaneously said that taking the stand in front of an audience where there were senior people, healthcare professionals and managers listening to them not only as a peer, but listening to them as a speaker, yes. Did more for them than in certain cases their medicine, which is another thing that I should mention in looking at the health care system for the future. The idea of looking at the whole person and not just one particular medical condition, which is very difficult for a professional to do because they are led to practice through a specialty is not a subspecialty, but the joy, the goose bumps of seeing the patient pull out the lessons of their medical and digital experience, because all those that we invited had both they had a medical condition to which they had somehow contributed in terms of solution, along with the health care professional, by using the by using new technologies, the Internet and app or something in some way to improve their their status.
Saul Marquez:
What inspired you to start Doctors 2.0?
Denise Silber:
One day, a few couple of years before that, I found myself organizing as a volunteer, an event that had turned into three hundred people. I had been an expert for this French commission that was trying to determine what to do with the quality certification for web, for web stuff websites. And I created an association to discuss this with stakeholders to go beyond what the government was doing.
Saul Marquez:
And as we get health care in particular in general.
Denise Silber:
Yes, it was a quality of health care that one of the things that I had done early on was I was invited to many group working groups about the quality of information of health care information. And so that led me to around the world. But I did this in the U.S., in various European countries that concessions around the world. I did not do this in languages in Asia. But there was a Eurocentric remark. However, I did participate in so many of these reflections on what do we do with information that hasn’t been vetted by a medical publisher that I wound up creating a symposium and a large company gave us a huge auditorium and it filled up. And I said, wait a second. And I don’t know why don’t I take this and make this might clearly this is a gift to know how to get people to attend things. Why don’t I make this into a business? I then discovered that in terms of the intersection between events and digital, that those events attract predisposed people, people who are ready, early adopters and since including DRS 2.0. So my goal, which is has always been to convince the decision makers, the healthcare professionals. I believe that if tomorrow there were an uprising by health care professionals saying give us more digital, give us more patient engagement, the things that I believe in, we would have no problem. It would happen because authorities want to work along with the doctors. It isn’t happening because not only do they have burnout, but they’re not given the opportunities to really learn about these things. So that’s why I’m still interested in the event world. But I want to be lodged where the doctors and other health care professionals are really going and in private and non private. But isolated events for..
Saul Marquez:
I love it. I love it. Thank you for sharing that Denise and what would you say today is an exciting project you’re working on?
Denise Silber:
Well, it’s that I’ve always gotten more than one thing going on. It’s a getting the word out and identifying events where I can bring this expertise, this digital and and the patient. And I’m meeting next with a law firm. Law firms like to promote their expertise by organizing events. So hopefully we’re going to put together a cycle that reflects these interests. And secondly, it’s just been proved that there’s a hospital somewhere in France in a very small, smallish town that would like me to participate in there. I’m not sure if I should say digital transformation, but in using the power of collective intelligence and inspiration to create new ideas, working directly with the healthcare professionals from all over the hospital, it’s a fairly large hospital, several hundred beds, and they need to make the atmosphere more conducive to better recruitment. So I’m going to do a lot of brains storming with these people of what they would like to see in the way of novelty, and I know that or innovation in some of that will definitely be digital. Some of it may be related to exchanges with patients. I’m looking forward to this project, which will I guess start soon and run for several months.
Saul Marquez:
Fascinating. Denise, you’re always up to something really cool.
Denise Silber:
So that’s because I’m excited about life. If I can make a spontaneous answer to a question you haven’t asked. I wish I would recommend that people do something I’ve started doing a little while ago, which is a daily gratitude workbook or notebook at night when the day is ending. I just write down very quickly some bullet points of what I’m grateful for. And I think that this gives you a view when you look around yourself, you see the good stuff.
Saul Marquez:
Love that. Yeah. That’s a great. It’s a great tip, Denise. So I personally in my morning routine Right. when I wake up, the first thing that I do every day is go through several things that I’m grateful for. I don’t write them down. I think that’s a good next step for me. And listeners, it is a big deal. You know, if you come from a place of gratitude versus a place of expectation, it’s a completely different world. And Denise is obviously a testament to that. So appreciate you sharing that, Denise.
Denise Silber:
Thank you.
Saul Marquez:
Getting close to the end. I’ve got a lightning round. A couple of questions for you there, followed by a book that you recommend to the listeners. You ready? OK. What’s the best way to improve health care outcomes?
Denise Silber:
Ask the patient.
Saul Marquez:
What is the biggest mistake or pitfall to avoid?
Denise Silber:
Isolating the individual into their different parts rather than looking at the person as a whole.
Saul Marquez:
How do you stay relevant despite constant change?
Denise Silber:
It’s about what you are exposed to. So reading material and challenging yourself by meeting with people that are different from yourself.
Saul Marquez:
What is one area of focus that drives all else in your work?
Denise Silber:
Listening.
Saul Marquez:
And Denise these next two or more on a personal note for the listeners to get to know you. What is your number one health habit?
Denise Silber:
The number one thing that I’ve learned is a new habit is how to breathe in, to breathe better. Thanks to using a digital watch.
Saul Marquez:
Love it. And what is your number one success habit?
Denise Silber:
Get outside. I think that we spend too much time at our desks.
Saul Marquez:
I agree with you. That’s a good one.
Denise Silber:
To get with people. I met my best when I’m in an exchange with people face to face. That’s really good. What book would you recommend to the listeners? So I have two books to recommend, one for your whole life. That is called The Art and Practice of Loving Living a Heartfelt Yes by Frank Andrews PHD. I did this book within a course that’s on line called Love as a factor for social justice that you can find from Stanford on Coursera and in the short term Sapiens by Yuval Harari, which gives you a new way of looking at the history of the Earth.
Saul Marquez:
Some great recommendations, the names and listeners, you could get links to those books, as well as a full transcript of our interview with Denise go to outcomesrocket.health and in the search bar type in Denise Silber it’s S I L B E R or type in Basil strategies. That’s B A S I L strategies. You’ll find this podcast there with everything you need to take action on the things you learned today. So, Denise, before we conclude, I’d love if you could just share a closing thought and then the best place for the listeners could get in touch with you or learn more about your work.
Denise Silber:
Closing thought is that one must always remain optimistic so long as you have a breath in yourself. There is something to be done.
Saul Marquez:
The great message and if the listeners wanted to learn more about you and your work, what would be the best place for them to check it out?
Denise Silber:
Well, they can follow me on LinkedIn under my name, and they can also check out the doctors20.com website and its blog.
Saul Marquez:
And it’s doctors 20 dot com.
Denise Silber:
Yeah, doctors20.com.
Saul Marquez:
Beautiful. And we’ll.
Denise Silber:
Of course, if they follow me on Twitter, I’d be very happy that to have to openers.
Saul Marquez:
A health to all Paris doctors20.com. We’ll leave those links in the show notes. If today’s interview resonated with you and you want to check out this, this awesome conference that the nurses put together. It’s now in better part of a larger one as well as her work. Follow her on Twitter. We’ll leave all those links in the show notes, So Denise, just want to say thank you so much. I really have enjoyed our talk today.
Denise Silber:
Thank you. You’re doing a wonderful job yourself in presenting these people to your listeners.
Thanks for listening to the Outcomes Rocket podcast. Be sure to visit us on the web at www.outcomesrocket.com for the show notes, resources, inspiration and so much more.
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