When you are trying to shake things up in healthcare, sometimes enthusiasm gets mistaken for desperation.
Alex Fair is known to many of our American Readers as one of the Grizzled Pioneers of what eventually became known as Health 2.0. He’s head of a Meetup group in NYC with close to 5,000 members (Health 2.0 NYC, for which this Editor was an event organizer/producer for over a year), founder of health innovation-only crowdfunding platform Medstartr (see ‘Websites We Like’), a successful health tech event producer (MedMomentum 16 coming up 1-2 December) and a few other things in between. In short, Alex Hustles For The Cause.
One of his projects is the Major Depressive Disorder (MDD)/Depression Care Innovation Challenge with Takeda, which closed for applications last Monday. There was a last flurry of promotion via personal notes in social media and emails which is standard–well-known in style for those of us on Alex’s lists. But sometimes enthusiasm gets misinterpreted.
So a funny thing happened to me yesterday on Twitter. Someone told us that we sounded “desperate” in our tweets and posts. At first, my lizard brain said “what, I don’t want to be seen as desperate!” as if I was trying to get a date for the Junior Prom (which I did, thank you very much.) But then my mission-driven, we-have-got-to-fix-this-NOW-so-more-people-like-Jess_Jacobs-Live-longer-and-better-lives brain fired up and said, “Damn Right I’m Desperate!” The fact is that if we want to move the needle on innovation, we need to do something about it and desperate times DO call for desperate measures.
Read all about it here. If you want to change healthcare, especially in the US, you might get a little frustrated! (P.S. Along with the controversy is a calendar of upcoming NYC health tech events).
Thanks Donna for this and all your help over the years. In point of fact, I do usually shave though!
And use aftershave? ;-) Can’t have innovation without it!