The Pulteney StreetSurvey
INNOVATION IN THE AFTERMATH
Looking back at stressful times in history — the plague, the Hundred Years’ War, the War of the Roses — you see that in the aftermath there’s often a bright period where people work together to achieve great things. We had a struggle with the pandemic but the future is bright, and I think you’re going to see a lot more healthcare innovation because of what we’ve learned.
Healthcare has typically lagged 20 years behind normal businesses in terms of technology, but now Silicon Valley is staring directly at the industry, looking for new ideas to make our institutions more resilient. Between COVID and recent ransomware attacks, there’s a realization that we need to catch up and embrace technology to be flexible enough for the future. With artificial intelligence platforms like the Opollo Ecosystem, we can fully harness available healthcare data to increase patient access to high-quality, low-cost healthcare. (Think of it as Moneyball for surgery, where the competitive marketplace and the efficiencies gained from more accurate duration forecasts result in increased revenue growth and cost savings for healthcare facilities.)
Everyone agrees that we want higher-quality care at a lower cost — and because this is America, we want it immediately. Whether we like it or not, though, medicine is a business, and our healthcare system is very feudalistic, with massive hospital systems and insurance companies that can dictate prices. But by using technology to better forecast and plan, we can figure out innovative methods to reduce costs, administrative burden and staff burnout, and improve access and care.
Dr. Ryan Young ’11, who earned his dual MD/MBA from the University of Buffalo in 2021, is the founder and CEO of Opollo Technologies, a healthcare AI company. Their cloud-based AI platform, the Opollo Ecosystem, consists of two components: Opollo™, an algorithm that learns from a wide range of healthcare data to yield more accurate surgery duration forecasts in minutes; and the Opollo Exchange, a marketplace for healthcare facilities to sell the resulting operating room vacancies to health insurance companies.