Expert Spotlight: Marc Brown – Navigating Ambiguity And Building Conviction

Marc Brown, HealthTech Founder and CTO with 20 years of experience building products and leading engineering teams talks about agentic workflows in healthcare, staying curious to foster innovation in tech teams and qualities that make a successful CTO. Connect with Marc on LinkedIn here.

1. How do you see the role of technology evolving in patient care over the next decade?

Two areas that are holding back personalized patient care are a lack of context (or rather data) and an inability to leverage this data.

Although we’ve seen many roadblocks regarding data interoperability, I believe the next decade will bring a renewed focus on empowering patients to take control of their health. More recent initiatives such as the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA) will begin to standardize our approach to the responsible sharing of patient data. While it will take time for widespread adoption, patients will quickly see the value in owning their data and will gravitate toward products and services that make this possible.

Additionally, Artificial Intelligence will continue to play an increasing role in healthcare. Trust will grow as the technology matures, and Generative AI will provide the tooling necessary to empower patients and providers to transition from reactive to proactive participants in their health journey. The use cases this will unlock will prove to be massive.

2. Which emerging technologies do you believe will have the greatest impact on healthcare in the near future?

AI agents, via agentic workflows, will have a transformative impact on healthcare. An agentic workflow can be defined as the decomposition of a complex task into an iterative, multi-step process, backed by LLMs. This decomposition allows for the use of smaller models, each fine-tuned to solve a highly specific problem, which generates more accurate responses with lower inference costs.

Going beyond a single prompt/response, AI agents have the ability to reflect on their output, identify potential issues, and improve before returning a final response. And multi-agent collaboration allows for different agents to “work together” to solve a particular problem.

While it’s still early days, the promise of fully autonomous AI agents will streamline admin tasks by automating cumbersome workflows, identify patterns while analyzing vast amounts of patient data in real-time, and provide a unified interface so patients can ask questions, schedule appointments, and solve many other problems that help the patient take charge of their health.

3. What role does/will artificial intelligence play in your current and future projects?

I recently left my previous role to explore a few ideas. Workflow automation has clear business use cases and can provide an immediate impact on admin and ops efficiency. Rethinking the user experience using modalities such as voice and video can help us build new mental models around how to interact with conversational AI. Please reach out if you’re working on similar problems in this space, I’d love to chat!

Additionally, AI will play a role in not only what we build, but how we build. In a recent Stack Overflow survey only 1 in 5 developers were satisfied with their job, citing tech debt as the primary frustration. Coding assistants, quickly followed by coding agents, will help address this by automating bug fixes, security patches, and other lower-level tasks, freeing up developers to focus on high-impact contributions.

4. Can you share an example of a major project or initiative in healthcare technology that inspired you?

5. How do you foster a culture of innovation within your technology teams?

Always stay curious, and identify ways to encourage this mindset within your team.

This moment feels similar to the beginning of the mobile app era 15 years ago. There was a lot of initial excitement but it took a few years for the business use cases to become clear. Developers and companies stayed curious by experimenting, learning, and iterating. The ultimate success of that era would not have been possible without this period of experimentation, and the current excitement around Generative AI is no different. The best applications are yet to come.

6. What are the key skills and qualities you believe are essential for a successful CTO in the healthcare tech sector?

While there are several qualities required to be a successful CTO, a few stand out based on my experience. It’s worth acknowledging that this list could be applied to any industry, and qualities are weighted differently depending on company size, stage, specialty, and strengths/weaknesses within the broader leadership team.

• Navigating ambiguity: During the earliest stage, whether launching a company or building a new feature, you will be surrounded by ambiguity. The best leaders can synthesize big questions into a focused set of problems to solve.
• Building conviction: Great leaders can clearly communicate the “why” behind strategic decisions, ensuring your team is bought in on the direction of the business.
• Maintaining malleability: While conviction is critical, it’s just as important to embrace feedback along the way and be willing to update your point of view or change direction when necessary.

Marc has over 20 years of experience building products and leading Engineering teams, most recently as Chief Technology Officer of Caire Health where he was responsible for all aspects of the tech organization. Previous experience includes Engineering and leadership roles at various companies such as Ro and Etsy, as well as co-founding and launching a startup in the Health & Wellness space. Connect with Marc on LinkedIn here.