Each month, What’s Next Health talks with leading thinkers with big ideas about the future of health and health care. Recently, we talked with Daniel Kraft to explore the potential of exponential technologies. Daniel chairs the Medicine Track for Singularity University and is executive director for FutureMed, a program that explores how fast moving technologies can re-invent health & medicine. The next FutureMed will be held Nov. 3-6 at the Hotel Del Coronado in San Diego, CA.

By Daniel Kraft

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

— Arthur C. Clark

We live in an exciting, and seemingly ever faster, exponential age, where many technologies, from Artificial Intelligence, social networks, and mobile, to personal genomics, robotics and nanomaterials, when converging together do indeed approach magical qualities as they become faster, smaller, smarter and more powerful at often dramatically decreasing price points.

As we set forth on the Health Data Exploration project, we're being guided by a wonderful set of advisors. Here's a quick video post from one of them, Larry Smarr, the director of Calit2.  Larry's a pioneer who's exploring the frontiers of quantified self, as you can see from the extraordinary talk he gave at TEDMED earlier this year.

From: Paul Tarini

To: Christine Nieves, Beth Toner and Thomas Goetz

Date: June 7, 2013

Thomas, I agree with your description that Health Datapalooza is the place to be. For me, this year's conference was a great experience and offered a really rich environment for networking. At RWJF's booth and throughout the conference, I had conversation after conversation with a range of people who are interested in liberating data and using liberated data. I talked with researchers, entrepreneurs, health care providers, people from state and federal government, and representatives from large corporations. It was really quite impressive.

We need your help. We’re launching a podcast next month and we need a name for it.

The purpose of the podcast is to provide listeners with insight about the types of ideas in which the Pioneer team wants to invest. (It’s the same reason we write posts on this blog.) Christine Nieves Rodriguez—Pioneer’s program associate—will be the host (she has the best radio voice of all of us) and segments will include conversations with program officers, grantees and friends, as well as news about grants and events.

So, this is what we came up with:

• Pioneering Ideas (yes, we realize this is also the name of the blog)
• Pioneering Voices (meh)

Please help us. What would you name a podcast about seeking out new ideas for health and health care innovation? We need to make a decision by June 21, so hurry up and leave your suggestion in the comments below. Thanks!

I recently stepped out of my largely virtual, long distance relationship with the Khan Academy and went behind the wizard’s curtain to see how it’s actually done.  Certainly, we here at RWJF have met many Khan personalities in real life, including Sal, himself, as well as Dr. Rishi Desai, who leads the Khan Healthcare and Medicine Initiative. However, it's one thing to meet individuals outside of their natural habitat—and quite another to track them back to their offices in Mountain View, California, and see what gives. 

From SFO, I carefully followed my Droid Navigator’s directions off Highway 101 into a warren of non-descript low-slung office buildings—non-descript except for the telltale proliferation of Google signs and young adults riding colorful Google bikes.  I drove around to the back of several of those complexes and finally found the correct numbered grouping.  It really could have been any office or doctors’ office complex in the U.S.  The Khan suite is on the second floor.