What Would Lisa Suennen Say?
Tech Tonics started at the beginning of 2015 with a goal of featuring the people and passion at the intersection of technology and health. We have had 24 great shows featuring the perspectives of consumers and physicians, technologists and investors and others who represent the best and brightest from the digital health community. In […]
John Hixson’s career has taken him from a small town near Waco, Texas to the Johns Hopkins Medical School, a neurology residency at the University of Pennyslvannia, and ultimately to his current role at neurologist at UCSF and the San Francisco VA, where he focuses on the application of digital health tools to clinical trials […]
Alexandra “Alex” Drane has been talking about the “Unmentionables” like end of life, sex, loneliness and empathy long before it was cool to address these topics as core healthcare issues. Always the brightest light in any room, Alex draws people to her with her fresh and honest take on serious issues and her vivaciousness and […]
Writer, editor, entrepreneur, visionary – Thomas Goetz has always combined a sophisticated understanding of emerging technologies with a profound sense of humanism. This was evident in his work at Wired (where he served as executive editor for eleven years), in his wonderful book, The Remedy (Lisa’s book review here, David’s book review here), and through […]
When Dr. Sachin Jain got the call to become Chief Medical Officer of Anthem’s highly-regarded CareMore Unit, he could hardly have feigned surprise. It must have seemed like the role to which he was destined: a physician leader in an innovative delivery system The challenge, he says, was finding one. The son of a physician, […]
It seemed like a simple enough idea – evaluating whether the use of virtual reality goggles would reduce the pain experienced by hospitalized patients. Yet, when Brennan Spiegel, a gastroenterologist, clinical trial expert, and digital health pioneer at Cedars Sinai tried to offer it to patients, he struggled to find takers. “No thanks,” he was […]
The Health 2.0 Conference is always one of the most popular in the digital health realm. Matthew Holt and Indu Subaiya originated the conference back in 2007 as a small “dinner party” of like-minded friends to talk about emerging trends in what wasn’t even yet called digital health. Today they are host to thousands of […]
When he graduated from Tulane with a major in philosophy and a half a minor in French, John Wilbanks had little idea that he would become one of the world’s most important forces for good in the areas of citizen science, data sharing, and participant empowerment. So influential is he in this field that he […]
A recent SF Chronicle article talked about a new trend: medical students from around the Bay Area and the country increasingly dropping out of residency programs and instead going into careers in high-tech start-ups. Bijan Salehizadeh (say that five times fast!) was well ahead of that trend. In 1999, his final year of medical school […]
Jonathon Feit and I first met when he won the DC to VC competition where I was a judge. Several months later we coincidentally ended up traveling together to Moscow to talk about health IT, drink vodka and, in his case, belly dance at an Uzbeki restaurant. Full disclosure, I’m on the board of his […]
Lisa Suennen is a venture capital investor and the managing partner of Venture Valkyrie, LLC, which publishes the Venture Valkyrie blog and co-produces the Tech Tonics podcast. She is also co-founder of CSweetener, a women's healthcare mentoring organization.