Hello everyone. Thanks for joining for case study in strategic planning: partnerships and funding. So, you heard me introduce Corrie before. Remember it's a digital health platform to guide patients with heart attacks through their recovery. This leads me to talk about my foray into strategic planning. It was really eye opening for me, as a physician, to be building a business plan around the product. Once a grant is over, how does this live on? If we fund the project, the people working on the project, the equipment that's being used on the project through a grant, what happens a year from now, two years from now, five years from now when that grant is over? It wasn't something that I had really thought about, up until recently in my career, but it's so critically important if somethings can then live on, being adopted, really make a lasting impact on patients. As a cardiology fellow, my focus was on the next publication. I was publishing paper after paper after paper and really proud of that, but the concept of thinking beyond the paper or beyond the grant was just not something that I was being exposed to. This concept of a sustainable business model, thinking beyond that next paper, was really new. I really, honestly didn't even know that it was relevant to me. I remember meeting with someone early about a mobile digital health idea I had and discussing how excited I was about getting cardiac patients more physically active, and the way we're going to approach this problem, and how we wanted to publish a really high-impact paper on this. They were asking me, "Well, what's the business model," and I was thinking to myself, I hadn't thought of that. Is that something I even should be thinking about? As academic physician, is that something that I'm even charged with being a master over needing to figure out or I just publish the paper and leave it to someone else to figure that out? So, that was interesting concept for me. So, when we think about funding for the Corrie project, I have illustrated here a number of sources. So, as we can see, the Corrie funding really came from a variety of sources, and really these are relatively modest dollar amounts as compared with large multi-million dollar NIH grants. But you see a number of the sources listed here included some initiatives like the Thalheimer initiative, Coulter that are geared towards providing funding to an innovative solution like Corrie, as well as our own Prevention Center. Because this has quality safety aspects to it, some funding from the Patient Safety Advisory Board, as well as through some technology companies in the form of device supports. So, this was devices being provided because the industry was excited about what we're doing. So, this really was meshed together and was able to get us pretty far as you've heard. But beyond the money, it's kind of, if you've ever seen the show Shark Tank, often, folks go in asking for money to invest in their business, but it's also about the strategic partnership, the knowledge, the know-how, the vision where things are going, the connection. So, in our case, connecting with Apple was very helpful to us, very inspiring to be involved with them and to build our solution Corrie on Apple's CareKit framework. So, because we are working in the space here at Hopkins and gaining momentum with a prototype, with really a solution for the problem we are tackling, and because we are connected with the tech innovation center here, we were put on a phone call with our colleagues at Apple. Because we took that phone call, and because we shared what we are working on, and because others were not yet working in the space of that phone call, there was a lot of mutual interest. At the end of that phone call, I'll never forget my colleague, Francoise Marvel, asking me, "So, what can we do next? Can we accelerate this project?" Our colleague at Apple said, "Come out to Cupertino." That led to us working more closely, and really was a special opportunity that we got, not just because we were called up and said, "Hey, come out here," because we were already working on this making progress and had gained some credibility to allow us to get that opportunity and then take advantage of it. So, I think the the message here is not just to wait for something to come along, but to be working on something, make connections, and then find ways to accelerate your progress. So, strategic planning is important. It's very important. Many projects start without even thinking far enough ahead about where the project will go. I get frustrated reading proposals for projects or even published papers, where the idea is we're going to look at the association of x with y. But it's unclear why do you want to know that association. What is that going to lead to? What if your project is successful thinking several step ahead? If it just goes exactly beautifully as you expected, then what's that going to lead to? Is it going to be another research project? If so, then what will that lead to? How does this get back to impacting patients, helping people, being nimble to adjust your projects, really to inform clinical practice with a lot of other evidence being generated at other institutions, with clinical guidelines changing, thinking what are really fundamental problems that need solving, that I really can address with this. If we get the answer, it really has a real chance to make an impact. So, at the end of the day, this is why I'm passionate about Corrie. Because if Corrie works, and we get this to patients not just at Hopkins, and we build a business model that works, this could be something that has a lasting impact, where we change healthcare delivery, where we empower patients to better manage themselves, where we literally saved lives and keep patients home with their family over the holidays. Whereas, if they didn't have Corrie, they would be lost and not doing as well and may end up back in the hospital, may have really serious morbidity or mortality. So, this is why I'm passionate about Corrie because you have to think steps ahead. It's more than just the paper. It's about real impact on patients. I deeply believe this is going to change their behavior. The cool thing about Corrie is that interprofessional collaboration. There's teamwork between the School of Medicine, School of Engineering, School of Nursing, School of Arts, bringing folks together, the School of Public Health, to think about this problem. Really, importance of that was ingrained in me at a training program that I did at UCLA. It was an NIH mobile health training program. That really ingrained to me the importance of thinking beyond just who's my cardiology colleague that I collaborate on this project or the statistician that I collaborate with, thinking more broadly about all the different stakeholders. So, factors that have led to our success as a team, I think really that is one of the key factors, that multidisciplinary teamwork, that open-mindedness to be able to work together, integrate different perspectives, and really go after a really patient-centered solution. The goal for many projects, I think you should think about every school in the university, how could they help set up meetings. See what their perspective is. I think you'll be surprised at the interest that you'll get from folks in different schools and the contributions that you wouldn't ever thought of in your own bubble. So, thank you again for joining me, for this video. I hope you find it very helpful. Take care.
