Drea Burbank is an M.D.-technologist and serial entrepreneur whose work is focused on applying high-tech from hard science into critical sectors. She has projects from artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency, to stem-cells, and microbiome science. 

Her interdisciplinary skill set comes from a dedication to reducing barriers to innovation at the intersection of medicine, technology, and research, and the pursuit of enriching public health through these developments. Drea Burbank brings so much to the table in the world of medicine and tech, and it was insightful to hear what she had to share. 

Tune in as she talks about struggles inherent in healthcare technology, her passion for public health, spirituality, and her work with indigenous groups. 

HIGHLIGHTS

[00:46 ] Drea Burbank in Background in Medicine and Technology

[06:59 ] Her Current Projects

[08:04 ] Challenges of Electronic Healthcare Systems

[12:09 ] Bringing in More Tech to the Healthcare Industry in Terms of Security and Care

[19:07 ] Lifestyle Approaches to Healthcare

[22:33 ] Drea’s Interest in Public Health, Preventative Medicine, and Spirituality

[26:21 ] On Spirituality and Medicine

[33:43 ] Drea’s Thoughts on the Intersection of Medicine and Technology with Spirituality

[38:37 ] More on Drea’s Current Conservation Project 

[42:59 ] Takeaways from Working With Indigenous Cultures

[47:05 ] Importance of Health Data and Sensor Technology 

00:02 Dave: Hey everyone, welcome back to another season of Data-Driven Health Radio, I’m your host Dave Korsunsky. On this show we dive deep into how you can use data to measure, manage and optimize your health with the latest science and technology. This show is brought to you by Heads Up which is our web and mobile app designed for individuals and healthcare professionals who need a precise way to measure and manage health data. Check us out on headsuphealth.com. If you’ve got comments, questions or feedback on this show shoot us an email support@headsuphealth.com, we’d love to hear from you, and with that said let’s get into our next exciting episode.

00:47 Dave: Hey everyone, welcome back to Data-Driven Health Radio and I have a very special guest today Drea Burbank, she is an MD and a technologist and a million other things that I could not actually have time to finish going through in anticipation of this interview but I just went down the rabbit hole of Drea in all of the interesting projects that she has her hands on so, we are gonna get into all kinds of really, really interesting topics related to health, optimization, technology, some of Drea’s personal passion projects that she is working on that she wants to share with the world. So, Drea, we first got on your radar screen because you had written some content around the struggles that are inherent with electronic record systems and that’s actually why I started my whole company in the first place. So, we will have lots to talk about there, really just like, can I even get a trend line of the most important health metrics that matter to my existence above ground, it was a nightmare. It was like paper records and patient portals and I was trying to work on a health issue and I just needed a simple trend line of like inflammation markers and to this day that is still impossible so I would really like to dig in there and we’ll branch off from there.  But Drea, if I may, I would like to take a crack at your background just from like the initial cursory research I did cause there was just some absolute gems on your website, can I and then you can correct me.

02:17 Drea: Yeah sure, I’m curious to see what your takeaway was.

02:20 Dave: Alright, so I just scribbled a few things here but Drea is an MD-technologist and she is a digital nomad with a yoga addiction, love that. She pretends to live San Francisco but we don’t actually know if she lives in San Francisco, yoga dirtbag, professional pyromaniac, uptight uber nerd and smartass. So those were the nuggets I pulled off the site. Welcome Drea to our show.

02:48 Drea: Thank you, I am so happy to be here.

02:50 Right on. Well, let’s just start with something simple like the content, the piece you put out there around inherent challenges with electronic health records, technology like I said that’s why we built our company but I’d love to hear about your background as an MD first and foremost, sounds like you probably ran into a lot of those challenges but maybe we could just start with your background in healthcare and the types of work you did or maybe still doing in the medical field and then lets go from there into all these other amazing worlds that we can open up.

03:23 Drea: Yeah, happy to talk to about it. So, I grew up off the grid in central Idaho, I did 9 years in forest fires and then I went to medical school in Canada. I was in a rural and remote training program and..

 03:35 Dave: Where in Canada? I’m from Canada.

03:37 Drea: Really? I was in Kelowna, I was the first of four medical students in the hospital in Kelowna.

03:42 Dave: It’s beautiful up there.

03:43 Drea: It was stunning. We were so lucky they had just, they had kept med students out of the hospital for a long time and a lot of the, you know, top clinicians across Canada would retire to Kelowna cause it was a kind of a beachfront property for Canada.

03:56 Dave: Yeah.

03:57 Drea: And they ran the hospital the way they had always wanted to run their hospitals so the nurses basically functioned like residents, and they had a really collaborative relationship with the physicians and they had a huge catchment area so they would pull all kinds of specialty cases but they still did overnight call from the hospital. So, I worked with mostly attending physicians and I had just had a really idyllic version of medicine. Yeah, it was like the best of specialty care with generalist care and like good working relationships, interdisciplinary, yeah and really, really talented physicians, clinically talented. So, we had a daw system in the hospital that had been introduced and I was watching these amazing physicians trying to use this daw system and I was like I could do better I started playing Plants vs. Zombies and I was like wow you could just do something like this it would be easy. Yeah, so, I think sometimes that naivete is necessary to do interesting things, you’re like oh this would be easy. So, I was like well I’m just going to do a year in Silicon Valley, I’ll design something and then I’ll, I’ll come back to medicine.

04:59 Dave: I got ya, so that was what kind of like, first of all you’re a US citizen but you went to Kelowna to do the training, is that correct?

05:06 Drea: So, I was a forest firefighter and I followed it north. I started following big stacks in British Coloumbia, all the best falling if your you know a logger or forest firefighter happens in Canada so I really wanted to learn that. I married a Canadian and I was already in Canada so when I went back to school I went to school for medicine in Canada.

05:24 Dave: And then that experience got you down to Silicon Valley to start working on technology centric problems in healthcare, is that accurate?

05:33 Drea: Yeah, I still think that if you want to get really hard tech skills you gotta go to Silicon Valley. I know that sounds exclusionary but the competition in Silicon Valley is global and so when you go there you end up working with the best people from all over the world. There are other tech hubs obviously, Toronto has a great tech hub, Vancouver does, Austin all these other placed I was just in Dubai and it’s great but if you want to get that really, really hardcore skillset I think you need to spend some time in the Valley.

 06:01 Dave: Yeah, I spent the better part of 10 years out there, I was in Paolo Alto working at VMware and that’s where I got to really like build my skills, work alongside all of these amazingly brilliant people just learn how that whole industry works out there. I don’t think I really could have started a company, I probably could have, but the skills I learned there are I think just inherently part of what’s helping me stay successful is just cutting my teeth in Silicon Valley basically.

06:32 Drea: You don’t have to stay there I just, they have got a really good ecosystem like if you go to Stanford hospital a lot of the academics will leave for a couple of years, start a tech company and then go back to Stanford so they kind of like cycle through and the hospital is pretty good, they have got a like a really nice like, I worked with Nirav Shah for a little bit he is a computer science professor who works with a lot of the doctors, Nimar Agaeepour so they are just super integrated with the clinical needs and that’s where, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it anywhere else.

06:59 Dave: So, are you practicing now or are you mostly working on other types of projects?

07:04 Drea: Yeah, I left clinical medicine in 2018, we got drafted to work on all kinds of high-tech stuff during Covid. We ended up running a concierge Covid testing network for Hollywood which was so random, I was just, they called us, they couldn’t work at all during the height of the virus and they asked us to get test results back and we were like yeah we can do that it’ll be easy. So we, they were getting their test results back in 7 days from Labgen it was our TPCR we got our first results back in 6 hours and then every producer in Hollywood  called us and we ended up testing like NFL players, sports broadcasters during the height of the shutdown. So, that was a lot of fun for us because it was basically using both sides of our