radically different than [anything] in the history of health and medicine because of these exponential changes we’re going through,” Smarr says.
As we’ve reported previously, Smarr has used some of these new diagnostic tools to calibrate his own health, along with a variety of innovative devices that measure his physical activity, caloric burn, and sleep efficiency. Along the way, he’s become something of a poster child for quantified health (also known as “quantified self”), and he sometimes talks as if he’s getting more speaking requests than he can count.
What’s important, though, is that Smarr contends that San Diego already has all the pieces needed to become “one of the real leaders in quantified health.” He sees plenty of expertise here in genomics, molecular diagnostics, high-performance computing, wireless technologies, health IT, and data analytics. Yet these are only the ingredients. They still need to fit together, and San Diego still needs to muster the business and technology leadership to put the pieces together.
So what would it take to accomplish that here? This was one of the primary themes of our discussion.
“We are 3 million people,” says Diego Miralles, who heads Janssen Healthcare Innovation, an entrepreneurial initiative in San Diego that is part of Johnson & Johnson’s pharmaceutical business. “We have four or five medical systems. It would be great if we started working with those medical systems to make San Diego the city of the medical future, if we could really come together.”
The experts quickly identified a number of hurdles that must be
