Dr. Michael Ast: Moving Health Innovation Towards the Speed of Tech Innovation

The Slice

Dr. Michael Ast is an internationally renowned orthopedic surgeon and the Chief Medical Innovation Officer for the Hospital for Special Surgery. In this episode, Dr. Ast discusses his new CMIO role at HHS, his background as a former gymnast, and his guiding principles for driving healthcare innovation towards the speed of technology innovation to better serve patients.

JUMP STRAIGHT INTO:

(03:47) - Dr. Ast reflects on his time as a gymnast - “You wanna make everyone great. And so it was an interesting thing that I learned sort of the hard way through a patient's experience when I was 14 years old”.

(07:15) - How Dr. Ast’s residency years got him interested in entrepreneurship - “I found myself asking questions like When you're a doctor how much money do you make? And I got one of two responses either: ‘Oh my gosh, no one's ever asked me that before, we don't talk about that stuff. Or: ‘Learn to be a doctor. The rest will be fine’.”

(13:22) - The mission to spread high-quality medical knowledge on a mass scale - “You look at these Twitter threads and it's fascinating because a complicated case gets posted and 15 people respond and they're all a little different.”

(17:46) - Dr. Ast on the obstacles he faced at the beginning of his entrepreneurial journey - “I had two options I could just give up or I could really push for it and see what happens. So I did what people will jokingly say I always do when I have a new idea: I made a PowerPoint presentation.”

(29:49) - Discussing the intense fear of failure among the healthcare professionals and Dr. Ast’s return to HSS - “HSS has a Michelin chef. The food is great. You couldn't pay a million dollars for the view from the patient rooms of the Easter river of HSS. It's perfect. Patients never wanted to leave, until they learned that hospitals aren't great places for healthy people.”

(33:17) - “Make sure you’re having fun with it”: The keys to acquiring patience as a physician and an innovator - “When you're doing something that you enjoy, you're gonna keep doing it, even if you fail.”

(35:25) - What it means for Dr. Ast to become Chief Medical Innovation Officer for HSS - “It's built on these sort of four fundamental pillars, right? It's clinical excellence, education, research, and innovation. And the way I think of innovation's role at an institution like ours is to learn from those other three and see where we can make things better.”

(40:56) - Dr. Michael Ast’s favorite pizza - “There's always this New York City vs Chicago thing. That's a separate debate. Obviously, New York City Pizza is s better than Chicago pizza.”

EPISODE RESOURCES:

Connect with Dr. Michael Ast on LinkedIn

Learn more about Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS)

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