Episode 10: Doc Mike Evans - nudging towards better health

Virality of another kind, whiteboarding prevention and life at One Infinite Loop

Here is Episode 10 of the North of Patient Podcast:

You can also find it on:

YouTube
Spotify
Apple Podcasts

If you think back to the early days of videos going viral on YouTube, you might recall a 2011 video called “23 and a half hours”, a video that talked about exercise, the single best thing you can do for your health, through a catchy whiteboarding drawing video, well before that became a thing. That video garnered over 6M views and was one of the most watched public health videos of it’s time, and was the brainchild of Doc Mike Evans, who went on to build a med school for the public on YouTube with over 30M “students”.

What you might not know is that Doc Mike Evans spent the last 8 years working at Apple in Cupertino on Special Projects on their Health team, designing and running experiments on how to improve life and health for their 1 billion users across the world. Doc Evans is now on a gap year and I’m honoured that North of Patient is one of the first places where he has gotten a chance to discuss his career and his thoughts about the future of healthcare.

In this podcast episode, Dr. Mike Evans, an academic family physician from the University of Toronto, discusses his eclectic journey from an English Literature major to becoming a leading figure in healthcare innovation. Dr. Evans shares how his experiences ranging from working in the high Arctic, involvement with Mother Teresa, founding a successful environmental consulting company, and running a media lab at the University of Toronto, ultimately led him to collaborate with Apple.

Key stamps from our conversation are below:

02:02 Background and Early Life
03:46 The High Arctic and environmental pioneering
15:59 Founding a Health Media Lab and YouTube Success
18:17 Impact of 23 and a Half Hours Video going viral
21:27 Challenges in Health Communication and Education
27:03 The Role of Generative AI in Healthcare
29:50 Working at Apple
32:33 The Power of Daily Health Interactions
32:54 The Scale and Influence of #BigTech in Health
34:52 Challenges and Lessons from Working at Apple
40:51 The Future of Wearables in Health
49:23 Preventative Health x Behavioral Economics
52:28 How #singapore became an ideal health innovation partner
55:09 Exciting Trends in Health Technology
01:01:02 Advice for Healthcare Providers and System Leaders
01:05:24 What's Next for the Doc

Key Quotes and Themes:

1. Scale of influence

   “So your patient might come and see you two or three times a year, but I'm seeing them 85 times a day on the phone. And health is a lot about what you do every day, not what you do the week before you see the doctor. That's super interesting to me. And we're not talking about like 80, 000 people on a massive family practice or, you know, even a million people - we're talking a billion people.”

2. Getting stuck on how we’ve always done it

   “When I go to these things at medical schools now, I'm sort of struck by how much they're looking for solutions from within. We were talking about all of us doing organic chemistry to get into med school because that's what everybody did, so you're like, “Oh, that's what you need to do”. But I've never used organic chemistry in my clinical interactions. And I'm sure if you ask the public, they want you to be a great communicator and a great librarian and a great creative. And have a high emotional intelligence. That's what we should be looking for in a doctor, not organic chemistry scores, but that's how we do it because that's how we've always done it. And I think that happens a lot in medicine.”