About Health Unchained
The Story Behind The Podcast
Behind The Mic
Ray Dogum
Show Host
My diverse interests in technology, healthcare, and business have led me down an unexpected career path. I earned my BS in chemical engineering with the naive intention of improving the world by fixing all its problems, atom by atom, molecule by molecule, protein by protein. During my undergraduate years, I interned at Pfizer, where I witnessed first-hand how vaccines are manufactured and distributed across the world. Straight out of undergrad, I landed a role as a project engineer building custom industrial equipment for power-generation plants.
After realizing that the energy industry was not right for me, I thought about pursuing a career in medicine. Serendipitously, in 20I3, I had the opportunity to lead the launch of a stem cell laboratory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology where we studied the effects of diet on aging and cancer and we published this Nature article.
At this point, I realized that I want to improve people’s experience with healthcare at a larger scale. Although I considered becoming a physician to explore the deep connections in the human body, I decided to focus on educating myself about the business side of healthcare. At Boston University, I pursued my MBA in Health Sector Management and a MS in Information Systems. During these two years, I had my fair share of case competitions, startup pitches, and healthcare conferences. Through these experiences, I realized there were still many regulatory, technical, cultural, and economic barriers that needed to be overcome to reach a forward-thinking healthcare ecosystem that would address today’s problems of cost, access, safety, privacy, and security. I believe that blockchain technology, in conjunction with other developing technologies, will give us new governance models to overcome these existing barriers and restore health to healthcare.
Why Start Health Unchained?
My passion to help fix healthcare comes from personal experience. I’ve seen friends and family try to navigate through frustrating obstacles while trying to get the care that they need. I’ve witnessed the confusion and struggles of dealing with healthcare insurance fortresses, waiting three months to see a specialist, repeating medical paperwork (on actual paper), and digging for old vaccination documents, just to name a few. Why jump through so many hoops when there are possible technical solutions for these problems?
All these problems have one thing in common; one or more participating parties who do not have a good way of trusting each other. A hospital needs to verify your insurance, medical history, and identity through a 3rd party. Pharmacies need to be cautious about counterfeit drugs and fake prescriptions. Patients have to believe that their surgeon is truly medically certified!
Blockchain technology has the potential to create this layer of trust, reducing the friction to participate in a healthcare network. Blockchain-based ecosystems can allow patients to own their own data, removing the shackles that tightly grip the human healthcare experience. Using blockchain technology will dramatically improve population health management, medical supply chain, health-monitoring devices, genetics research, and other health-related sectors.
I bring the top healthcare innovators, who are applying blockchain technology solutions, to Health Unchained where we will discuss their strategies in this exciting new field.
