This week, The Venture Variety Show explores the surprising power of art in healthcare with Emily Peters, a healthcare brand strategist and author of Artists Remaking Medicine. With a Silicon Valley background at Practice Fusion and Doximity, Emily discusses in this podcast how creative thinking can transform healthcare systems for the better.
Emily is no stranger to the challenges and triumphs of healthcare innovation. Her work, highlighted by the book, explores how art and creativity are essential for transforming healthcare systems. This is more than just the aesthetics of installing a Zen rock garden outside a hospital lobby. It’s about using creativity and art to solve complex problems in medicine, making systems more humane and effective.
For example, in Emily’s book, she details one such story involving musician Yoko Sen, who, after an ICU experience, used her artistic perspective to address the jarring and noxious sounds of patient monitors, medical alarms, TVs, speakers and everything else that makes noise inside a healthcare facility.
In response to her ICU visit, Yoko has since created new, gentler sounds for medical monitoring devices in the ICU, available to hospital clinicians worldwide, including one in Switzerland which is studying the impact of patient monitoring devices.
“I love that artist’s perspective of being curious,” Emily says. “Not necessarily blaming and saying like, how dare they do this? But going and actually figuring out why those sounds were the sounds that they were and figuring out how to change it.”
Health Equity Innovators Summit
Next month, Emily will take her insights to the stage at the Health Equity Innovators Summit, organized by Coyote Ventures, an early-stage venture firm focused on women’s health and health equity investments. As a presenter, Emily hopes to shed light on how investors, startup founders, policymakers and health practitioners can come together to design a healthcare system that works for everyone.
In the podcast, Emily admits that changing healthcare can seem like an overwhelming task. The web of scientific and policy rules, combined with the entrenched culture of healthcare institutions, can make the system appear resistant to change.
“How to find that in-between place where you can acknowledge the things that are possible, but also be really realist about how the system works and how the economics of it work, that’s really fun,” Emily says. She sees this tension as a source of exciting conversations and potential breakthroughs.
And while The Venture Variety Show typically revolves around venture, startups, trends and storytelling, today’s podcast episode is about innovation and its venture-adjacent journey into healthcare. It’s also a testament to why the podcast is called Variety, as it explores the ways in which venture and tech intersect with one another and various sectors, including healthcare.
🎧 Click on the video at the top to play the full episode. You can also follow The Venture Variety Show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube.
🔶 Whether you’re a healthcare professional, an innovator, or simply someone who cares about the future of health, this episode is for you.
🔶 As you’ll learn in the podcast, creativity isn’t confined to canvases and art studios. It’s a tool for reimagining and reforming the systems that impact our everyday lives. Emily’s story is a reminder of the impact that innovative thinking can have on an industry as crucial as healthcare.
🔶 And don’t miss Emily’s presentation at the upcoming Health Equity Innovators Summit, April 10-11 in San Francisco. Grab your tickets and be part of the movement shaping the future of health for all.
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