The Health Technology Podcast

Abner Mason: Healthcare for a Changing Population

Abner Mason, Founder & CEO, ConsejoSano

Before creating ConsejoSano, Abner was Founder and CEO for the Workplace Wellness Council of Mexico, now the leading corporate wellness company in Mexico. From 2003-2008, he was founder and Executive Director of AIDS Responsibility Project, driving the creation of CONAES and JaBCHA, the first business councils on HIV/AIDS in Mexico and Jamaica. Abner previously served as Chairman of the International Committee and member of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS (PACHA), appointed by President Bush in 2002. He spent ten years in the Massachusetts State government, including roles as Chief Policy Advisor to Massachusetts Governors Paul Cellucci and Jane Swift, Governor Cellucci's Undersecretary of Transportation, and Deputy General Manager of the Massachusetts Transit Authority. Before joining state government, Abner worked as an Associate Consultant for Bain & Company. In 2018, he founded Health Tech 4 Medicaid (HT4M), a non-profit coalition of healthtech leaders collaborating to create technology for Medicaid programs. Additionally, he is a founding council member of U.S. of Care, a nonprofit centered on improving healthcare access developed by former Medicare/Medicaid administrator Andy Slavitt. Abner is a graduate of Harvard.

Amr Salahieh: Shifamed, a Silicon Valley Medtech Innovation Hub

Amr Salihieh, President & CEO, Shifamed

Amr is a seasoned medical device entrepreneur with over 25 years of experience in the medical device industry. Amr is the founder of Shifamed LLC, a Silicon Valley-based medical device incubator founded in 2009, from which Legacy Portfolio Companies Maya Medical, Kalila Medical, and Apama Medical have successfully exited and through which three additional companies are currently under incubation. Prior to founding Shifamed, Amr founded Sadra Medical, a percutaneous aortic valve replacement company, which was sold to Boston Scientific in 2011 and co-founded Embolic Protection, Inc. (EPI) which was sold to Boston Scientific in 2001. Amr has extensive R&D management experience stemming from his engineering consulting firm, Sobek Medical LLC which he sold to EPI, and from his work at CardioThoracic Systems and Guidant. Amr is either the inventor or co-inventor on >100 granted and >140 published US patent applications. He holds a B.S. in Biomedical Engineering and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Case Western Reserve University.

Joe Bengfort: Digital Transformation, Safety, and Privacy in Healthcare

Joe R. Bengfort, SVP, Information Technology & CIO, UCSF Health

Joe R. Bengfort is senior vice president, information technology, and chief information officer at UCSF Health as well as an associate vice chancellor at UCSF. His responsibilities span across the university, including UCSF Health, research, education and administration, as well as strategic information technology (IT) initiatives at the University of California (UC) health system. At UCSF, he leads IT information and analytics, financial and human resources core systems, infrastructure, operations, customer support services and security. He represents UCSF at UC to establish strategy and tactics to protect data, systems, and university and health system operations.

Bengfort joined UCSF in 2011. He worked for 22 years at Perot Systems, where he held a broad range of senior leadership positions, including the management of client relationships and service delivery at Parkland Hospital, Lucile Packard Children's Hospital Stanford, Triad Hospitals and Stanford Health Care. He has a bachelor of science in electronic engineering technology from Texas A&M University.

Charles Fisher: Digital Twins for Clinical Trials

Charles K. Fisher, PhD, CEO & Founder, Unlearn.AI

Charles is a scientist with interests at the intersection of physics, machine learning, and computational biology. Previously, Charles worked as a machine learning engineer at Leap Motion and a computational biologist at Pfizer. He was a Philippe Meyer Fellow in theoretical physics at École Normale Supérieure in Paris, France, and a postdoctoral scientist in biophysics at Boston University. Charles holds a Ph.D. in biophysics from Harvard University and a B.S. in biophysics from the University of Michigan.

 

Malay Gandhi: The Advantage of Being the Underdog

Malay Gandhi, Senior VP, Business Operations, Evidation Health

Malay is an active angel investor in early stage, health-focused startups and advises a number of leading health tech companies. Most recently, Malay served as the SVP of Business Operations at Evidation Health, and prior was an EIR at Greylock Partners and led Rock Health as its CEO and Managing Director.

As an investor, Malay originated early stage investments in Benchling, Collective Health, Evidation, Honor, Solv, Stride Health, and Virta amongst others. His research and work in health tech have been cited in the The New York Times, Financial Times, CNBC, NPR, Bloomberg, USA Today, Inc., BuzzFeed, and The Information.

John Adler: How to Handle Money and Investors

John Adler, Jr., MD

John Adler is the CEO of both Zap Surgical Systems and Cureus Inc. Dr. Adler is world-renowned for inventing the CyberKnife and the related field of image-guided therapeutic radiation.

Dr. Adler has been on the faculty of Stanford University since 1987, being appointed the Dorothy and TK Chan Professor of Neurosurgery and Radiation Oncology in 2007. His entire medical and neurosurgical education happened at Harvard, excepting a one-year fellowship at the Karolinska Institute with Lars Leksell, the “father of radiosurgery”. As an academician, John is the author or co-author on more than 300 peer reviewed articles and book chapters and serves or has served on the editorial boards of eight different peer reviewed journals. He is also a named inventor on more than 20 patents.

While creating the CyberKnife, Dr. Adler founded Accuray Inc (NASDAQ: ARAY) in 1992 to commercialize his invention. Up until 2009 he served in varying roles at Accuray including CEO, Chief Medical Officer and Chairman. To date Accuray technology has been used to treat more than one million patients and most modern radiation equipment now incorporates John’s basic idea for image-guided targeting. In 2002 Dr. Adler founded the CyberKnife Society, later (2012) renamed the Radiosurgical Society. He also serves or has served on the scientific advisory boards of 7 different medical device or pharmaceutical companies.

In 2014 Dr. Adler founded Zap Surgical Systems in Silicon Valley with a mission to “Advance Cancer Treatment for All Humanity”. His invention, the Zap-X received US FDA clearance in September 2018.

John also founded and serves as the Co-Editor-in-Chief of Cureus.com, the world’s largest and fastest growing multi-disciplinary open access medical journal, publishing nearly 3000 peer-reviewed articles each year. 

Unrealistically and even laughably John yearns to live the peripatetic life of a big wave surfer.

Frank Fischer: Top-Level Management

Frank Fischer, Chairman of the Board, Neuropace

Frank Fischer has more than 40 years of senior management experience in the medical device industry. He co-founded NeuroPace in Dec 1997, led the company as its President and Chief Executive Officer from January 2000 thru July 2019, served on its Board of Directors since inception and is currently Chairman of the Board. Prior to joining NeuroPace, Mr. Fischer was President and Chief Executive Officer of Heartport, Inc., a cardiac surgery company, from May 1998 until September 1999 and served on Heartport’s Board of Directors. Previously, Mr. Fischer was President and Chief Executive Officer and a director of Ventritex, Inc., a company that pioneered implantable cardiac defibrillators, from July 1987 until the sale of the company to St. Jude Medical, Inc. in 1997. Before joining Ventritex, he held various management positions at Cordis Corporation from 1977 to 1987 in the cardiac and neurosurgical device areas, serving most recently as President of the Implantable Products Division. Currently he is a member of the Board of Directors of Nevro, Inc., the Board of Trustees of both Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Babson College as well as the Board of Directors of the Epilepsy Foundation of America. Mr. Fischer holds B.S.M.E. and M.S. in Management degrees from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Fred St. Goar: Interventional Cardiologist and Physician Entrepreneur

Frederick St Goar, MD

Dr. Frederick St. Goar is a cardiology specialist, physician inventor, and entrepreneur. He currently serves as vice chairman of the board of the Fogarty Institute in Mountain View, CA.

His career was jump-started at Stanford when he joined Paul Yock in working on intravascular ultrasound imaging. Subsequently he became involved in launching Heartport. He invented the minimally invasive MitraClip system, co-founding Evalve. He consults for several established medical device companies and is active in the Stanford Biodesign program as well as the Fogarty Institute.

Dr. St. Goar has over 36 years of experience in the field; he graduated from Harvard Medical School and completed a residency at Stanford University Medical Center. He currently practices at Advanced Cardiovascular Specialists and is affiliated with medical facilities such as El Camino Hospital Mountain View Campus and Mills-Peninsula Medical Center.

 

Tom Osborne: Predicting the Future with Big Data

Thomas Osborne, MD, Chief Medical Informatics Officer, VA Palo Alto Health Care System

Thomas Osborne, MD, is the Chief Medical Informatics Officer at VAPAHCS. He graduated from Dartmouth Medical School, and completed his diagnostic radiology residency at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, MA, and neuroradiology fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. He is board-certified in radiology and has his CAQ in neuroradiology, both from the American Board of Radiology. His current focus is on building collaborations within the VAPAHCS network to positively transform healthcare, and his interests include applications of artificial intelligence in medicine to advance health care.

Ali Farahanchi: How the Pandemic is Changing Investing

Ali Farahanchi, Managing Director, DHVC

Ali Farahanchi is Managing Director at DHVC, an early-stage tech and life science fund in Palo Alto. With more than $650M assets under management and 100+ companies in its portfolio, DHVC invests in variety of areas in healthcare including therapeutics, diagnostics and tools, and digital health, with strong emphasis on novel mechanisms and data-driven platforms. Previously Ali has worked in research and in consulting roles in semiconductor and healthcare industries, and has obtained graduate degrees in engineering and management from MIT and University of Chicago.