Andy's Blog

Reporting a Device Injury as a Patient

Sat, 12 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As someone who likes to experiment with my diet, I’ve always been curious about real-time glucose monitoring. I wanted to see how different foods—especially things like fruit, bread, or heavy meals—impacted my blood sugar. So when I had a chance to try out a continuous glucose monitor (CGM), I was eager. It’s not something I needed, just a personal experiment with my body.

Unfortunately the Abbott Lingo biosensor I used only works on iOS (my wife purchased a gift, not realizing this). So, I had to use my wife’s iPhone to pair the sensor and occasionally check-in with the data. Once up and running, it sampled every five minutes.

Every Moment in Business Happens Once

Fri, 18 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’m not sure when entrepreneurship education really took off, but it’s popular. Whether it’s traditional business schools, New York Times bestselling books, social media influencers, podcasts—there is a lot to absorb, too much I think.

Academia is education. Sure it’s more than that, but distill it down and it’s sharing knowledge, skills and values to foster personal growth.

I’ve been thinking about entrepreneurship education a lot recently—asking myself questions like, “How do we cultivate better entrepreneurs from the start?”, or “Could this have been more successful if they knew better?”

The Case for Quality Management

Fri, 14 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Paperwork That Matters

Novelty is essential in research. It’s what drives academic inquiry and keeps the wheels of discovery turning. But in healthcare innovation, novelty alone isn’t enough. The real measure of success isn’t just a new idea—it’s whether that idea can translate into something meaningful for patients and providers. That’s where rigor, real-world evidence, and insights from academic medical centers come into play.

This recent LinkedIn post from Ricky Spero, a UNC startup founder (and all-around great human) made an interesting distinction: academia is driven by novelty, while industry is driven by customers.

Is MedTech Getting More Affordable?

Fri, 21 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Affordability

Healthcare affordability matters. As a patient, I care about affordability—but as an innovator, I care about it even more. If essential healthcare products become luxury goods, we all lose.

This conversation is often dominated by skyrocketing drug prices, with infamous cases like Martin Shkreli’s move to license the antiparasitic drug, Daraprim, and raised its price to insurance companies from $13.50 to $750.00 (USD) per pill. Add branded drugs, insurance formularies, and coverage gaps, and the problem gets even harder to solve.

SVB Healthcare 2024 Review

Sat, 11 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

State of Venture Capital

I recently came across the 2024 SVB Healthcare Investments & Exits Report—a compelling snapshot of the current venture capital landscape. Given my particular interest in MedTech and HealthTech, I was eager to see how these sectors are holding up. From the massive deals in AI-driven protein design to steady investment in device startups, the report offers a wealth of data and insights that can help founders, investors, and healthcare providers navigate today’s unpredictable market.

Governors and Throttles in Innovation

Thu, 12 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Momentum

In healthcare innovation, success is determined by the delicate balance between risk-taking and risk mitigation. Borrowing from engineering concepts, I like to think of these forces as throttles and governors. Throttles push innovation forward—encouraging speed and risk, while governors temper that speed—imposing limits to ensure safety, compliance, and reliability.

But here’s the catch: the setting of a governor is a design choice, not a fixed constraint. And it’s this design choice that I find particularly fascinating because it directly impacts how much progress we can make before risk becomes untenable. So, who sets these limits, and how do they evolve?

The Thin Silver Line - The Boundary Between Bias and Breakthrough

Sun, 10 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

When the topic of big challenges in academic commercialization comes up, there is a good chance I’ll break into a rant about Conflict of Interest (COI). While I’m not sure it’s the biggest limiting factor, it certainly causes both significant delays and stress among faculty. The disclosure and management process is often opaque, accusatory, and riddled with interpersonal conflicts—a bitter irony.

The ‘silver line’ in COI management is about striking a neutral balance—ensuring research integrity without stifling innovation.

Beyond Intuition with Bayes Theorem

Tue, 18 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Intuition Fails Us

In his book, Thinking Fast and Slow, the late, great Daniel Kahneman proposes the following thought experiment (Kahneman 2012).

An individual has been described by a neighbor as follows: “Steve is very shy and withdrawn, invariably helpful but with little interest in people or in the world of reality. A meek and tidy soul, he has a need for order and structure, and a passion for detail.” Is Steve more likely to be a librarian or a farmer?

Forecasting Market Potential using Diffusion of Innovations Theory

Mon, 01 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The launch of a new product is risky. Sure, you’ve talked with customers, solicited opinions from consultants and done your market research, but how confident can one be prior to actually selling it?

One theory, called Diffusion of Innovations, tries to tackle the age old challenge

Will the dogs eat the dog food?

Diffusion of Innovations Theory

The Diffusion of Innovations theory, developed by sociologist Everett Rogers in 1962, was an influential set of ideas in understanding how new products and technologies gain momentum and spread through different populations (Rogers, Singhal, and Quinlan 2014). This approach is technology-agnostic, though has been applied to pharmaceuticals, MedTech and other industries.

At its core, the theory describes how an innovation interacts over time within a social system, and the importance of branding and organic marketing (e.g., word of mouth).

XR and Haptics Use Cases

Mon, 13 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

For the last few decades, many technical advancements in the digital world have not realized their fullest potential in the real, or physical world. The two domains are very much siloed with each experience largely contained within its respective environment. A major challenge in bridging these worlds is connecting our sense of touch, feel and space, alongside our visual field—arguably our two most dominant senses - together.

The FemTech Paradox

Wed, 28 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Why does the FemTech sector, with its potential to impact 50% of the global population, remain notably underserved and underfunded?

What is FemTech?

FemTech, a term coined by Danish entrepreneur Ida Tin in 2016, represents a market sector at the intersection of technology and Women’s Health (“The Dawn of the FemTech Revolution” (2022)). It includes a wide array of technology-enabled, consumer-centric products and solutions specifically designed to address women’s unique health needs. Despite its relatively recent emergence, FemTech has its roots in a long history of women advocating for better healthcare solutions.

The Time Gap

Tue, 18 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Can Tools Like ChatGPT Spur More Innovation in Academia and Healthcare?

The challenge of limited time is a significant barrier many healthcare providers and researchers face when considering launching a startup. Balancing the demands of running a lab or seeing patients with the entrepreneurial journey is no easy task.

Is ChatGPT, or similar tech, a potential solution to this? In this post, I’ll explore my thoughts on how ChatGPT could be used to intellectually ‘bootstrap’ founding teams.

North Carolina's Medtech Surge

Mon, 03 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Cultivating Medtech

North Carolina has strong reputation as a leader in the life sciences and technology industries. Though from the inside looking out, Medtech has always played second fiddle to Big Pharma, and increasingly big players like Apple and Wolfspeed (Gordon (2022)), who are touting multimillion dollar deals to carve out a home here.

I wanted to take a dive into how strong Medtech is across the state, so I pulled pulled data from OpenFDA’s API (Food & Drug Administration (2023)).

Boosting Cycling Performance

Mon, 27 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Personal Experiments Behind Long-Duration Zone 2 Training

Cycling has surged in popularity, and with the rise of connected fitness platforms like Peloton, more people than ever are discovering the benefits of structured, data-driven workouts. I’ve been using Peloton as a training platform since 2019. It’s fantastic, convenient and has tremendous impact on my fitness level (and mental health).

Power Zone Training, a method developed for Peloton riders, leverages the science of training zones to optimize your cycling performance and fitness gains. At the heart of this system lies Zone 2 cycling, a crucial component for building endurance, improving efficiency, and laying the foundation for more intense workouts.

Hacking Healthcare

Sat, 18 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Data (In)Secruity

Healthcare data breaches have become a major threat to patient privacy and data security. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights (OCR) breach portal, there have been over 3,800 healthcare data breaches reported since 2009, with the majority of these incidents involving electronic protected health information (Civil Rights (2023)).

Cyber Attack Incidents in North Carolina

North Carolina is one of the many states that have been affected by the rise in healthcare hacking incidents in recent years. These incidents have raised concerns about patient privacy and data security, and healthcare providers in North Carolina have been taking steps to combat these threats.

The Nursing Gap in North Carolina

Thu, 22 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Many years ago I consulted with a faculty member in the UNC School of Nursing on an idea she was working on. She spoke passionately about a looming crisis related to nursing shortages.

She shared that the rate of new nurses entering the field has consistently undercut demand, not only locally but nationally.

And this was well ahead of the pandemic. Now nurses are burnt out and so labor shortages have only gotten worse.

How to Decide

Thu, 15 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Good decision making isn’t easy. I’ve had the opportunity to see it in others, and it’s an area I’m actively trying to get better at. Of course, some decisions are straightforward, but the ones that aren’t can be paralyzing. Hard decisions usually present themselves with too many unknowns–too little data or scarce information.

This week, we kicked off a workshop (Design Thinking for Healthcare Providers) with my colleague Ty Hagler. During the talk, he introduced a conceptual framework called the Cynefin Framework. As I learned about it, I had a realization that this was a missing ingredient I’d been struggling with for years. How does one approach solving a set a problems that are fundamentally different in nature?

Why Healthcare Pricing Transparency is Hard

Sun, 03 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

NPR ran a story last week about a quiet deadline that passed July 1st, 2022. CMS began enforcing price transparency requirements for healthcare insurance companies (see here for more details).

Healthcare is a strange business, no other industry is so backwards. For example, let’s say I travel to foreign country and I’m looking to buy something I need, like new clothes. I find a local proprietor who has what I’m looking for and say, “I’m interested in this this shirt, how much is it?”

Blockchain Use Cases in Healthcare

Tue, 31 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Blockchain technology has been steadily gaining traction. Bitcoin is now something your grandmother has heard about it (but doesn’t know what it is). In fact, it’s more and more common for people to buy crytocurrency using only their phone. That said, Bitcoin isn’t blockchain, it’s only one implementation of a growing universe.

Any time there is a successful technology trend in a given industry, it’s only a matter of time before folks look to translate it to other sectors. Fintech has seen some big successes using blockchain technologies, including Coinbase (crypto exchange), BlockFi (credit card rewards in crypto) and Alchemy (Amazon Wed Services for crypto). These, and other startups have received lots of attention from investors hoping to catch a future unicorn.

Scaling Unmet Need Discovery

Thu, 10 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Finding the “right” unmet need to address is a numbers game. Given you have a good decision framework and enough of them, you’ll be in the best position to identify and tackle a truly unmet need.

The challenge is that finding these requires some degree of brute force. You need to talk to a lot of experts, empathize, understand context and corroborate their “unmetness” by engaging a diverse stakeholder group. This is one way but difficult to scale, lots of people time.

The Potential of Optogenetics

Thu, 03 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

More than a decade ago, I had learned about an exciting new research technique called optogenetics. Back then, it was (and still is) largely considered a research tool. In essence, it’s a new(ish) way of activating genes with light. More importantly, it has the capability to regulate specific neurons. From a research standpoint, this is a breakthrough as existing techniques (e.g., eletrophysiology) have limitations. But the exiting part is this could become a new therapeutic modality, maybe.

Old School Patent Landscaping, and the New School

Tue, 14 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been brushing up on intellectual property and patenting lately (case in point, How to Design Around a Problematic Patent). In this post, I wanted to highlight patent landscaping approaches and explore how they’re evolving with technology.

What is a “Patent Landscape”?

Once you have an idea you naturally want to know if someone already thought of it.

“There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages.”
— Mark Twain, Mark Twain’s Own Autobiography

How to Design Around a Problematic Patent

Thu, 09 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Not So Obvious

Intellectual property, and patents in particular, are hard to navigate. They’re esoteric, codified in a way that’s open to interpretation and expensive. Still, a necessary ingredient for most any innovation to get off the ground.

It never hurts to brush up on things you though you knew — enter the book, Not So Obivious by Jeffrey Schox.

Great book, includes the basics but also case law examples to drive home a point.

FDA Approved AI/ML Technologies

Sat, 04 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Deep Learning

Source | Nature Medicine

The New(-ish) Frontier of Healthcare AI

I read an interesting article this week about FDA cleared AI tools on STAT. Their investigation was focused on potential bias in ML models relating to gender, race/ethnicity and geography. It’s an interesting topic, here’s the bottom line:

Of 161 AI products cleared by the FDA in recent years, only 73 disclosed the amount of patient data used to validate the performance of their devices in public documents. Only seven reported the racial makeup of their study populations, and just 13 provided a gender breakdown.

Digital Therapeutics

Fri, 20 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Player 2 Has Joined the Game

The idea of a digital therapeutic seems like an area with tons of potential. Mobile apps and ‘smart’ tech are ubiquitous. Add advances in data science and focus on big unmet needs, like mental health.

Drugs are hard to development — risky and expensive. See the figure below with a fantastic analysis of the cost of bringing drugs to market from 2009 through 2018 [@jama].

The Cycle of Fitness

Mon, 05 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Peloton's Matt Wilpers

Source | Triathlete.com

Hey, Coach?

The guy in that picture is Matt Wilpers and he’s oddly familiar to me. He’s a Peloton instructor, or coach as he likes to put it. Familiar because I’ve spent many, many hours staring at him while I make sweat puddles. It’s an asymmetric relationship – arguably not even a relationship. Still, I’ve learned lots of insights and his broadcast encouragement keeps me going when I entertain doubt.

About me

Tue, 16 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I’m passionate about innovation and changing what the future can be. In my day job, I work with some amazing healthcare providers, engineers, academics and business leaders—really interesting people with great ideas. I setup this site to explore topics interesting to me, and hopefully to some of you.

Feel free to drop me a line on Twitter or via andykantio@gmail.com

Little bit more about me

Professionally, I help people conceptualize new product ideas, give them resources to develop their technology, and spark startup opportunities. Currently, I’m Director of FastTraCS, a Medtech incubator based at UNC-Chapel Hill. Previously, I helped launch UNC’s first life sciences startup accelerator (Carolina KickStart) and was a fellow at the FDA’s National Center for Toxicological Research. I recieved my MSc in Toxicology from UNC-Chapel Hill and BSc in Biology from UMass.

Rapoport's Rules: Ethical Debate

Wed, 15 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Rapoport’s Rules by way of Daniel Dennett

Ever notice how some ideas keep popping up in your head? Even years after you heard them? In 2016, I listened to Free Will Revisited, A Conversation with Daniel Dennett. Honestly I got lost for a good amount of the discussion—fairly esoteric discussion of the “illusion of free will”, determinism and other topics.

During the conversation, Dennett commented on his fondness of Anatol Rapoport’s ‘rules’ during debate. While it’s not always top of mind, it’s a wonderfully eloquent framework for debate (Popova 2014):

Need Discovery

Sun, 05 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A brief summary on how to mine, discover and clearly recognize innovation potential. In this post we’ll describe our process, tools and lessons learned since we launched in Fall 2018.

Ultimately our mission is to address high-impact needs and solve them through clever engineering and business strategies. To be successful, our innovation process is designed to be as nimble and efficient as possible for identifying, understanding and prioritizing clinical unmet needs. Our goal is to build something not found outside of technology transfer offices - a pipeline.

Value-based Health

Thu, 02 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

New Value-based Payment Models at UNC Health

Value-based healthcare has been put forth as part of the solution for America’s growing healthcare cost problem. Slowly, it is arriving. Fee-for-service (FFS) payment-based models, still the most common, are based on the notion that more care = better care. While partly true (e.g. primary care patient engagement), it also leads to misaligned incentives and contributes to decoupling care from clinical outcomes; for example, endoscopy for treatment of GERD (Shaheen et al. 2012).

Tue, 28 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000