Big Ideas in Healthcare Engineering: with Barry Shrier

It was great to welcome the humorous and knowledgeable Barry Shrier to UCL and the Institute of Healthcare Engineering. Barry is founder of Giant Health, a global community of people who are in health, tech and innovation. Giant Health does something similar to the IHE in that it connects innovators to find solutions to the problems being faced in healthcare.

During today’s talk, we covered how you can commercialise your health tech.

Barry’s own interest in improving healthcare stems from his own experiences of watching healthcare professionals take care of his elderly father and all the tools and devices they used.

The question of ‘why’ and ‘what’ is a good place to start if you’re an entrepreneur. Why does this need changed? What can I do to improve things? And it all comes down to doing things that are new and different - but then again new and different has its own problems as Barry has come to know with three failed businesses.

Regardless, failure should stop no one and as an entrepreneur. Barry doesn’t just have one business – he has many with one of his biggest commercial successes being Liberty Electric Cars which addresses global warming and climate change with clean engineering.

Apart from ‘why’ and ‘what’ you must also ask yourself whether the business is commercially viable, and the Business Model Canvas can help you do that. It’s a framework to think about things and although a little simplistic in its evaluation, it can still help you see if a product is commercially viable.

When it comes to yourself, here’s some things to think about:

• You need a team. Things like this are never done singularly, and you need to surround yourself with A’s or network to find those A’s. Steve Jobs is famous for surrounding himself with A’s, and maybe also for stealing ideas off other people!
• You must also learn to be open minded and not have an ego when it comes to doing things. Nobody is really qualified in starting a business and no one knows it all, so hire those who do.
• Learn to be open minded, flexible and pivot when you need to.
• Have perseverance – a lot of entrepreneurs have had business failures – even the president Abraham Lincoln had many failures before he became one of the greatest presidents!
• Have a ‘I can do it’ attitude.

When it comes to innovations in the healthcare sector, there’s a few things to know:

• Innovation will only happen if there is opportunity.
• Small thinking equals small results.
• Healthcare is tricky – there’s the immediate conflict between the payer, user and the consumer and you need to define the needs of each of them. You need to be honest about those needs because there might be situations where finances might disallow you from solving an issue or helping people really in need.
• Healthcare is cautious, conservative and evidence based so it’s slow returning. Your investors won’t get easy and quick returns – for entrepreneurs it isn’t as simple as calling some hospitals and getting your business off the ground. There’s also the academic challenges of your business not meeting health system needs.
• Healthcare is complex and personal – you will be personally affected if your tool or device negatively or positively impacts lives.

Giant Health holds an annual event which helps facilitate healthcare innovation and supports health-tech entrepreneurs and investors. Find out more about the event.