To Innovare or not to innovate

You’re a science professor. A colleague asks you to arbitrate a dispute with a student over a question on a physics exam. Your colleague thinks the student deserves a zero, but the student demands full credit.

Here’s the question: “Show how it is possible to determine the height of a tall building with the aid of a barometer.”

The traditional answer is clear: You take pressure measurements with the barometer at the top and at the bottom of the building, then use the difference to compute the height.

But this wasn’t the answer the student gave.

Instead, the student wrote: “Take the barometer to the top of the building, attach a long rope to it, lower the barometer to the street, and then bring it up, measuring the length of the rope. The length of the rope is the height of the building.”

Do you think the student should get full credit?

The answer is undoubtedly correct. But it’s a deviation from the norm. It’s not what the teacher had taught in class—the expected path to the expected outcome. A barometer is supposed to measure pressure, not serve as a makeshift weight for a rope.

This story is from a short essay titled Angels on a Pin, authored by science professor Alexander Calandra, who was a fan of unorthodox teaching methods. He penned the essay shortly after Sputnik’s launch to criticize the traditional teaching methods used in US science classes. He chided what he called the “Sputnik-panicked administrators” for giving students “repetitious hodgepodge.”

Not much has changed since Sputnik.

Our education system is still an assembly line of sorts. Students are mechanically moved from one grade to the next, where they are fed the appropriate formulas, molded into the appropriate shapes, and taught the appropriate uses for a barometer along the way. There’s one curriculum, one right way to study science, and one preapproved, prepackaged method that spits out the right answer on a standardized test.

Here’s the thing: In real life, the right answers are cheap. Anyone can Google “how to use a barometer to determine height” and find the expected answer.

Innovation lost much of its meaning once it became a buzzword. People claim to be innovative when they’re simply following a well-beaten path. But someone who’s being innovative—someone who’s reimagining the status quo—by definition shows up with an answer that may not work.

Today, we need to democratize and decentralize the primary care and outpatient monitoring ecosystem in health care.PONS is focused on creating medical imaging networks by developing AI-driven consumer ultrasound technology allowing doctors to remotely scan, and monitor patients without needing to call them to the hospital.

As such, we took a step back and envisioned, how will healthcare look in 2030 in a decade? From now, we hope we will live in a world where everyone has access to health care.

Now you may ask, all of this could be enabled by one simple but fundamental shift in technology decentralized healthcare. Today, we're seeing a continuing and concerning trend where cities are building more and more hospitals to meet the demands of their growing populations. This may solve the problem for now, but it's incredibly expensive and not sustainable for the long term. So we began to think whether, in 2030, hospitals could consist of only crucial elements that require patients to be on site. All the other functions could be redistributed and made entirely mobile in a network of hyper-connected autonomous vehicles.

But let me share another use case, which explores this potential. Once you have this mobile unit, you can start to configure it to the specific needs of specific populations. Here. We see clusters of vehicles moving around town to manage population based on specific community needs. Various VE combinations could create pop-up environments for services such as health screening, respiratory treatment, or geriatric care. In times of emergency. These adaptive clusters will provide a dynamic response for incidents, natural disasters, or global pandemics, such as COVID 19 managing all of this from a care coordination center. The health system controller constantly evaluates the needs of each situation, redirecting relevant medical vehicles and resources to efficiently form proper hospitals. Could this be the future of decentralized healthcare, where we're able to bring healthcare to you in your moment of need?

The consumer—rather than health plans or providers—will determine when, where, and with whom he or she engages for care or to sustain well-being. Over the next 20 years, all health information will likely become accessible and—with appropriate permissions—broadly shared by the consumers who own it.

In the end, we have a choice.

We can continue to be risk-averse gatekeepers who teach to the test and pat the backs of the employees who blindly follow the process.

Or we can rethink our approach to leadership and reward creativity, instead of simply paying lip service to it.