King Tech High School teacher Stacy Miller leads the Entrepreneurship and Enterprise class that leads students through all the stages of building a small business as part of their class. Students brainstorm potential businesses, form teams, and select roles and then go on to manage, market, and sell their products and services. The students bring enormous amounts of creativity and energy to their endeavors and get real-time, real-life experience on what it takes to own their own future businesses.
Stacy makes sure students are well integrated into the current entrepreneurial events and every year students are encouraged to take part in Alaska Startup Week activities. This year she also presented Alaska Version 3 and asked students to come up with ideas. For Health TIE, students brainstormed overcoming the challenge of promoting the Step Away / Recover Alaska partnership which isn’t seeing as much uptake as Health TIE would like. The partnership allows anyone in Alaska to download Step Away to manage or abstain from using alcohol.
Health TIE is looking forward to using the King Tech Entrepreneurship and Enterprise ideas! Working with King Tech Entrepreneurship and Enterprise means Health TIE gets the benefit of accessing one of Alaska’s best resources: the ingenious innovation of our next entrepreneurial leaders.
Improving Healthcare by Doing Less
Introducing new ideas into healthcare is extremely difficult simply because the existing system is so complex.Both healthcare and society in general could benefit from ideas shared by Leidy Klotz in his book Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less. In the book Klotz shares ideas of improving processes not by adding more but actually doing less. Quite often when we try to fix something, we simply start adding to the processes or features but Klotz is arguing that rather than simply piling things on, we need to also consider what we’d subtract. The American healthcare system badly needs an overhaul so that it works better for everyone involved. Subtracting some of the complexity is a good place to start.
Great Ideas and Energy from Leading the Accelerate Alaska Healthcare Track
Is it too soon to talk about next year? The Health TIE team is still energized and excited after last week’s successful Accelerate Alaska events. After a Health Track intro and summary from Nikki Holmes, Jake Carpenter and Jacqueline Summers, there were presentations from:
Polly-Beth Odom with her presentation Daybreak, Inc. and the Tale of Technology
Tim Collin with his video Interactive Holograms to Promote Informed Consent of Vulnerable Populations.
Allyson Schrier’s with her presentation Accelerated! Zinnia TV and Health TIE
Dr. Eddie Naude’s with his presentation Sensor Fusion and the Future of Medicine
David Kereiakes with his presentation Providence Ventures: Strategic Venture Capital Transforming Healthcare
Each of these presentations highlighted the value of collaborating across industries and networks to improve healthcare in Alaska, the United States, and the world. Health TIE also led both a workshop and a panel that drew participation and ideas from those at Accelerate Alaska that brought together new networks and new ideas. Health TIE is grateful for the opportunity to be a part of Accelerate Alaska and to share our purpose of improving healthcare in Alaska.