From Forbes:
On a typically perfect summer day in Los Angeles, Patrick Soon-Shiong, the richest doctor in the history of the world, is bunkered inside his clandestine headquarters (nestled behind a security gate so unobtrusive that Uber cars consistently miss it), ready to show around a kindred spirit. T. Denny Sanford, who made a $2.8 billion fortune selling high-interest-rate MasterCards to people with bad credit scores, is now in philanthropy mode, giving away most of his fortune to children’s charities and hospitals. And he’s come to see what’s been touted as the future of medicine.HT: Next Big Future
Soon-Shiong, 62, has a lot to show. First, he walks him through a mock-up of a futuristic hospital room: There’s a patch that measures a patient’s heart rate, temperature and blood pressure, and a 3-inch white cube, called an HBox, connecting every device to a computer network. He shows off a darkened room covered in computer screens: a control center from which a handful of doctors can monitor hundreds of patients, even when those patients are at home. And finally he calls up several computer programs that make sure doctors know, up to the latest scientific-journal article, the best treatment available. It’s a sweeping assemblage of data-driven toys–fueled by $1.3 billion worth of furtive acquisitions, almost entirely using Soon-Shiong’s own money.
This dizzying demonstration wows Sanford, who seems extra-rumpled next to Soon-Shiong, in his crisp tailored blue shirt and suit pants, which he fills sleekly (he owns part of the Lakers and plays hoops regularly on an indoor court at his house). “I think it’s exactly what we need in this world,” Sanford says. “I also have a hospital group. I think we’re at 40 hospitals and 150 clinics, but costs are just going crazy, and the lack of communication between these organizations is just paramount to correct.” Soon-Shiong jumps in for the close: “The hospitals aren’t organized, funded or even have the skill sets to create this kind of communications infrastructure. Frankly, the government should have done it.”
As evidenced by the incompetent ObamaCare rollout, perhaps it’s better that Soon-Shiong did, and Sanford is taking whatever this doctor prescribes. They shake hands eagerly on a deal to deploy the technology at a children’s hospital in Phoenix, Ariz.
Even after the demonstration, though, exactly what Sanford is buying remains unclear. As seen over Soon-Shiong’s shoulder, the demos look fantastic. But no outsider I spoke to had actually laid hands on all the pieces of the technology. There is no real business plan. No pricing model. All they have is Soon-Shiong’s word, which is a tricky thing. While he’s undeniably brilliant, Soon-Shiong is equally undeniably a blowhard, a view shared widely across the medical spectrum (his Twitter handle:
@solvehealthcare).
“The marketing is three years ahead of the engineering,” says John Halamka, one of the first people to ever have his genome sequenced and the chief information officer of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. “What works on paper, what works in the lab and what works in a complex academic medical center are very different things.” He later adds: “Patrick is a showman of sorts, and for him to claim, ’I have solved the problems that everyone else over the last 20 years hasn’t been able to solve…’ ”
It bothers me, too. Soon-Shiong’s sparkling headquarters, a futuristic amalgamation of metal and glass where some of his 800 employees scurry about, sits in L.A.’s Culver City neighborhood, which has birthed dozens of Hollywood fantasies, including The Wizard of Oz. Accordingly, I’ve spent the past ten months trying to pull back the curtain. Soon-Shiong has allowed me an exclusive, detailed look inside his efforts–the Manhattan Project of medicine–just as he was closing the deal that will see them put into action for the first time at Providence Health & Services, a 34-hospital, not-for-profit Catholic health ministry in Oregon, California, Alaska, Washington State and Montana. And I talked to dozens of outsiders.
What was universal: the scope of Soon-Shiong’s undertaking. “When we went to see him and got a look at what they’re planning to implement, we were dazzled,” says Gillies McKenna, head of the department of oncology at Oxford University. “If you can make this work, and I agree it will be very difficult, he’s looking at an exponential increase in the amount of data we can base decisions on.” Soon-Shiong explains it this way: “We will have more information at our fingertips than we ever had in the history of mankind–every day. Not once a month, a week. Every day.” Such omniscience has the potential to reverse the perverse incentives–which emphasize treatments rather than results–driving America’s annual health costs past $3 trillion. It could also cure most of what ails us, even cancer....MORE
