Why is healthcare innovation slow? With Brad Power

Brad Power, the co-founder of Cancer Patient Lab shares his insight on a multitude of topics such as: the challenges of innovating healthcare, the importance of personalized care, and Brad’s personal experience with cancer. 

What we discussed

About our guest

Brad Power is the co-founder and CEO of the Cancer Patient Lab, a patient-led learning community for cancer patients and caregivers navigating testing and treatment decisions beyond the standard of care, and founder of the CancerHacker Lab, which also helps startups that are disrupting the status quo in cancer care. In 2018 Brad was a process innovation researcher and consultant with over 35 years experience and an author of over 75 articles for the Harvard Business Review when he was diagnosed with lymphoma. Brad went through a standard course of chemotherapy, which led to "no evidence of disease" for four years, until it recently recurred. In late 2020 Brad was talking to his friend Bryce Olson, who said he had hit a wall in keeping his metastatic prostate cancer at bay. Brad suggested to Bryce that they could run a hackathon (a collaborative effort of a diverse crowd of experts) for him to find his best next treatment option, which they did. Brad then hosted two hackathons: one for Linnea Olson, a lung cancer patient, and another for Kasey Altman, a young woman with a rare cancer. In 2022 Brad launched Cancer Patient Lab with two advanced prostate cancer patients. Brad hopes to make hackathons and other resources available to many more patients who are facing complex testing and treatment decisions. Brad is a founding member of ennov1; an advisor to 4DPath, Alva10, Cancer Commons, Consuli, Rabble Health, and Travera; and is an active contributor to the Personalized Medicine Coalition.

Watch the video of our episode on YouTube

Key Moments

  • 2 minutes:

    “Software is easy to change and people are hard to change.”

  • 25 minutes:

    “If I'm a doctor and let's say I'm in a community hospital environment, which is 80% of where cancer gets treated, and I'm dealing with a dozen or two dozen different kinds of cancer, I may not know. I had a patient that looked like you six months ago or a year ago, and this was the best thing at that time. Therefore, this is the best thing for you. And the patient says, no, did you not know about bispecifics or whatever the immunotherapy is or whatever the new, new thing is? And so the patient who's coming in fresh with open eyes finds things that the doctor who spends his or her life doing this kind of work is not able to keep up with.”

  • 42 minutes:

    “Cancer Patient Lab is the patient-led learning community that I co-founded that is a source of education and services for advanced cancer patients outside of the standard of care. If you have a diagnosis and there's a standard of care option as I did when I was initially diagnosed, there's really not a lot of use from the Cancer Patient Lab, but if you are not comfortable with that, which can be from the moment of diagnosis. If you have glioblastoma or pancreatic cancer, there aren't good options. It's good to be in a community like this. It's really pushing the envelope on what might be possible for you.”

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