Daily Archives: April 5, 2016

A Tale of Two Launches.

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Ain’t technology grand?  A new drone delivery company, Zipline, is getting ready to use drones to deliver cold blood supplies and pharmaceuticals to hospitals and docs in need, in Rwanda. It’s genius. Life-saving genius. If you want to lauch a new technology or business, it helps to save lives.  Rwanda makes sense because they need just in time, refrigerated delivery and the red tape is easily cut through. The gub-ment in Rwanda is malleable enough to make smart things happen. Drone delivery in the US has a ways to go. We have enough stuff flying around overhead. Combine that with all our misters of transportation, refrigeration, taxes and such and it will be like waiting in line at the DMV before action. Probably a good thing.

I was lucky enough to be involved with a healthcare start-up, Ketofast, that wanted to launch in the US a couple of years ago. It was a doctor supervised weight loss modality that helped morbidly obese people lose 9% of their body fat in 10 days. It was not particularly invasive, had been tested with over 50,000 people in Italy, and offered a lower recidivism rates, by 3 times, than other weight loss alternatives – including surgery.

Problem was 50 state insurance orgs. needed to approve the modality. Insurance and Medicaid had to get on board. Red tape upon red tape. In a country where just about one in three are considered obese, and diabetes is rampant, this product could have been a revolution. But for complicated governance. Sad, but true. Maybe we should have some members of the Rwandan government come on by and give a speech about health urgency.

Peace.