Lesley Solomon (MBA 2004) is the senior vice president for innovation and chief innovation officer at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. In this interview from June 2019, she discusses how she works to ensure that the work of Dana-Farber can reach beyond Boston.

My dad is a primary care doctor, and I spent pretty much every weekend going to nursing homes and making house calls with my dad and spending a lot of time around pretty sick patients. So for most of my life—my adult life—I decided I actually didn't want anything to do with health care.

But when I moved back to Boston a couple of years after graduating from Harvard Business School, I started to volunteer at Brigham and Women's Hospital. And then I ended up working there for a little while. And in working at Brigham and Women's, I actually realized that being in health care actually felt like coming home, to a certain degree.

At Dana-Farber, I oversee our innovation work, which is a grouping of commercializing our science and our technology to bring it from the labs to patients by partnering with industry, partnering with the venture capital world, creating startups. We also think about digital health and how that might be able to impact the work that we do, improve the quality of care that we give to our patients, and also make our clinicians more efficient.

One of the things that we focus on doing is creating clinical decision support pathways for our patients so that every patient coming in with a certain type of cancer can be treated with the same first line of treatment, the same second line of treatment. And that's something that our hospital developed over many years.

For me, what I thought about is, why should people that live in the New England area, or people that can fly to New England, be the only ones to be able to access Dana-Farber's care? And so when I think about the business of health care, I think about how can we package the intellectual capital of Dana-Farber and use that to get the way we deliver care at Dana-Farber out to the world?

And so I created a partnership with Philips Healthcare to take our pathways, put them on their platform, and now any hospital across the country or the world can take Dana-Farber's clinical pathways and provide the same level of care and thinking that we have at Dana-Farber. I feel strongly that the only thing between the science that's going on in the labs at Dana-Farber and that science getting to patients is time and money.

So what my office does, and what I do, is spend as much time as I can to accelerate that time by creating new funds to Dana-Farber. And so a lot of what I think about is, who are the industry partners, who are the venture capital, who are the investors that can bring the funds to Dana-Farber that we need to accelerate that science getting to patients, and do it with the right partner, for the right time, for the right science?

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