Last month, Facebook sent me one of those "remember?" messages. 7 years ago a crew for a National-TV documentary (VPRO Tegenlicht /backlight) followed me for a couple of weeks, depicting innovation in healthcare, challenges, opportunities and pitfalls and the work we were doing at Radboudumc.

I visited i.e. Singularity University, with my friends Daniel Kraft, Sam De Brouwer, Gunnar Trommer, Vital Connect and a snapshot of my connections overthere.
 

A lot has happened since. Some innovations made it, some are (still) struggling and some ended up not (yet) feasible. At present more and more of the ‘innovations’ backthen came through in either their original format, or in some kind of altered version. Tangible implementation of technologies, processes and strategies are coming to life. 

 

What also did come through is the massive change in how we look at the world of health(care), how technology boosts opportunities and that we should aim for the front end of the challenge : prevention. 

Since then I've quit my job at Radboudumc, started to advise Deloitte as an edge fellow (not employed, non-commercial and independent) and Erasmus Medical Center Rotterdam amongst others, on their health(care) innovation strategy, connecting them to my global network on- and offline.

In doing so creating an even bigger impact.

I’m proud of the engagement and the leverage to improve health(care) I get from my 800.000+ followers on LinkedIn and the 125.000+ active subscribers to my bi-weekly newsletter. 

The over 100 keynotes I give across the globe each year, all have been “digitized” and turned into more in-depth interaction from my home-studio, during this pandemic bringing deeper insights.  

We need people to try to make sense of what’s ahead by combining signals of developments into a picture of the horizon, we also need groups that combine and research those into validated and tested ‘installations’, and next we need enthousiasts to implement those into a broader reality and lastly diehards to create the new normal. We all have different roles to play.

Over time I found my sweet-spot and field of expertise at the front-end of this process, and combined with my network happy to hand-over to the next part of this innovation-chain.

Looking forward to secure the current boost in innovation as the awareness some things could be done better, and the ambition to take tangible actions is here. So yes; this pandemic has a horrific impact on people, families, businesses and society, but it also had a positive impact on some other challenges. Next it showed us how healthcare would’ve looked like in 10 years from now : overflooded, shortage of skilled personell and budget and an ever incresasing group of empowered patients, families and informal care. Let’s build on them as well! 

During the visit the documentary was recorded I also visited McMoon on Moffett airfield.

A former McDonalds after the place was 'abandoned", turned around to a place where many of the picture of the Apollo mission where digitised, showed around (again) by the great Dennis Wingo who always passionately tells about their mission, how they found old technology in people garages to in the end digitise almost every picture of the moon taken during Apollo missions.

It sometimes (hence often) takes years before innovations become mainstream, wrote a whole book about this, but aiming for the better (if not the moon) should always be the objective.

Stay safe as let’s build back better!