Giovanni Piedimonte, serves as Vice President for Research and Institutional Official at Tulane University & Professor of Pediatrics, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at TulaneSchool of Medicine.
Giovanni will serve on the panel "Evolving Technology, Disruptors and Regulatory Issues in HIT" at Becker's Hospital Review 12th Annual Meeting. As part of an ongoing series, Becker's is talking to healthcare leaders who plan to speak at the conference, which will take place in Chicago from April 25-28, 2022.
To learn more about the conference and Giovanni's session, click here.
Q: What are your top priorities for 2022?
Giovanni Piedimonte:
a. Target investments in strategic areas – Competitiveness in higher education and healthcare will increasingly depend on achieving technological advantage that makes your institution a better fit for the exponential digital acceleration our world will experience in the next decade. The challenge will be strategically distributing ever-limited resources among endless opportunities mushrooming in every operational field. Artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and precision medicine will spearhead a Copernican revolution in healthcare that will fundamentally change every aspect of delivering and receiving medical and surgical care. Hence the need to invest early and aggressively into gaining a competitive edge in those three highly strategic areas. The price for delaying digital and technological transformation will not be simply the loss of competitiveness. It will the rapidly progressive disappearance into irrelevance and oblivion experienced in the past by many (most?) dominant companies once believed to be too great to fail, like Motorola, Circuit City, Blockbuster, and many others.
b. Secure the workforce of the future – Pre-COVID analysis predicted that the rapid spread of automation would eliminate as many as 20% to 25% of existing jobs - equivalent to 40 million displaced workers in the U.S. alone - and depress wage growth for many more workers. The effect of automation was compounded by the aging workforce reducing supply growth and rising income inequalities reducing demand growth. While combining these three vectors seemed like forming a perfect storm in 2019, it now feels like the good old days in 2022. COVID- 19 has left behind the “Great Resignation,” an unprecedented mental health crisis, and a growing appetite for remote work options. On the one hand, this crisis will balance some of the effects of automation. On the other hand, it has created a gigantic vacuum in our workforce, especially critically needed specialized professionals performing non-repetitive tasks that the current robotic technologies cannot easily provide. Therefore, a fundamental priority for executives in higher education and healthcare will be the recruitment and retention of the talent needed to operate in fully digital environments of increasing complexity, as well as the new generation of leaders able to read not only the present but also the future constantly operating ahead of the curve.
c. Grow interdisciplinary, multi-investigator, convergence research, and development – In the past, research was primarily a sport for extraordinarily gifted individuals working with small teams. You can still do elegant research in your lab. However, suppose you want to bring actionable solutions to the compelling problems presented by the unprecedented accelerations of today’s society, whether arising from deep scientific questions or pressing societal needs. In that case, you are likely going to need the help of medical and public health specialists the same way you will need engineers, architects, lawyers, economists, social workers, and on and on. Only the convergence of their knowledge and experience can lead to real solutions. Furthermore, as experts from different disciplines pursue common research challenges, their knowledge, theories, methods, data, research communities, and languages become increasingly intermingled or integrated. Thus, today - and increasingly so in the future – research is a team sport practiced by large interdisciplinary teams, including investigators with widely different backgrounds and expertise. In particular, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are becoming central values driving attention to the extent to which research advances the participation of historically marginalized groups, addresses societal inequities, develops community engagement and partnerships, distributes findings widely to support broad research understanding, and innovates social change. Specific to healthcare, efforts to treat, cure, and prevent disease cannot and will not be confined within the walls of medical schools. Instead, the most exciting medical discoveries will happen across campuses and geoeconomic areas, made possible by the teamwork of researchers interconnected through the web and aware that the future of medicine hinges on the capacity for collaboration, inside the lab and out.
Q: What technologies and innovations are you most excited about in healthcare right now?
GP: The future of biomedical research and clinical medicine, both intertwined, are rapidly evolving and will change the access to and delivery of health care. In particular, the exponential growth of telehealth and precision medicine will allow tailoring specific treatments to individual patients with regard to their genetic and epigenetic makeup and other unique characteristics. Profound changes will become necessary because demographics will drive them. A new generation of digitally savvy young people will demand a new model of health care, so the alternative to sitting for hours in a doctor’s waiting room may lie in telehealth or artificial intelligence-aided medicine. The future of medicine will also consider social and environmental factors for predicting and treating disease, areas many researchers from across the world are currently exploring. We realize something is much more important than the genetic code, which is our patients’ ZIP code and shapes critical determinants of health, such as poor environmental conditions, unbalanced nutrition, and limited access to medical facilities due to lack of transportation. The state of health of large segments of our population depends primarily on socioeconomic conditions. The fundamental frontier for the future of medicine is to limit or abolish as much as possible those inequalities that make our healthcare system so ineffective despite being by far the most expensive in the world. Amid rampant technological change and new ways of looking at poor health, I still believe the physician will remain the centerpiece of future healthcare systems. Humans are going to be always at the center of this. Instead, the way healthcare is delivered will change because we cannot and should not stop progress.
Q: What will the lasting legacy of COVID-19 be on the healthcare system?
GP: The COVID-19 pandemic has been a rude awakening for our society, bringing to the global attention the importance of infectious disease surveillance because of the continual emergence of new germs all around the planet. This tragic pandemic was inconceivable till the end of 2019 in a world where most medical research was focused on the management of chronic metabolic, neoplastic, and degenerative diseases rampant in western societies. We were reminded that it is inevitable that at any point in time, the survival itself of our planet will be threatened by germs that either we know, but we cannot fight anymore, or new ones that we did not know anything about. Antibiotics have combatted previously lethal infectious diseases and increased life expectancy well beyond 40–50 years, which was the norm just a few decades ago. But now, the use and abuse of antibiotics are creating superbugs that will be increasingly difficult to fight. Antibiotic-resistant superbugs present a big challenge. Furthermore, new germs like SARS-CoV-2 — similar to the 1918 Spanish influenza virus, which caused the most significant rise in the mortality rate in history — can subvert global social, financial, and political systems for entire generations. We have also learned that the most effective protection against existent and emerging infections derives from prophylaxis rather than therapy, primarily through the rapid development of effective and safe vaccines. There is no doubt that, without the unprecedented research efforts leading to the discovery and rapid deployment of mRNA vaccines, COVID-19 would have resulted in a much more devastating and persistent health crisis.
Q: What advice do you have for emerging healthcare leaders today?
GP: I am a physician-scientist, but I like to work with engineers; I have worked with public health specialists, architects, even scholars in liberal arts. If you close yourself into an ivory tower, you will never come up with accurate solutions to scientific dilemmas with real relevance to society. It is much better and simpler to open the problem to collaborators with totally different backgrounds and expertise and then work together. All the ingredients — talent, facilities, energy, and forward-thinking leadership — are here in the U.S. for the dawn of a new era of research. The goal of new leaders should be to bring these ingredients together and, just like an enzyme, catalyzing the reaction needed so that our country can remain the beacon of technological and medical progress in the world. One of my favorite books is The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. According to The Tipping Point, the phenomena of transformations, such as water reaching the boiling point, do not follow linear paths. Instead, there is a point in their growth when they start to grow exponentially. The tipping point comes about after a particular process goes on a steady pace, and then all of a sudden, when the environmental conditions are ideal, exponential growth occurs. I firmly believe that the inflection point — the “tipping point” — is precisely where our biomedical research is right now.