The HBS Association of Northern California's COVID-19 Update, a virtual program featuring board member Dr. David Seftel (MBA 1992), has become the club’s go-to event, as alumni flock to the weekly Zoom meeting for the very latest on the coronavirus pandemic.

In his work as the CEO and Chief Medical Officer of Enable Biosciences, an award-winning early and accurate disease diagnosis company in San Francisco, Seftel had been aware of the pandemic from early on, and shared his thoughts and concerns with his fellow HBS alumni on the association’s board of directors.

“We started with a virtual update in late February” says fellow board member Shannon Lundgren (MBA 1994). “The inspiration came from conversations with David during a couple of board conference calls when he shared with us what he knew about the virus. I thought that it was important information and suggested we should share it with our membership.”

Lundgren suggested organizing and moderating the online program for club members, and Seftel agreed without hesitation. “My goal with the update is to curate all appropriate resources and put them in the proper perspective,” says Seftel, a physician and immunology expert whose company, Enable, is currently developing a highly-sensitive rapid COVID-19 test with its public health laboratory partners. “There’s been a lot of misinformation and hysteria out there, so it’s important to look at this from a crisis management perspective. Our HBS training prepares us for this. I want to give a merged medical and management perspective and talk about best approaches, how we might identify solutions, and how to execute them.”

To that end, Seftel and Lundgren created the live, hour-long virtual event with detailed slides and a real-time Q&A discussion. Each session is recorded and posted to the club’s Facebook page. “We feel it should be available to anyone as a public good,” says Lundgren. The pair also created a related COVID-19 topic on the club’s Slack channel to allow alumni to share ideas and activities focused on solutions.

“Each week, we take the best available new information and share it. Then we talk about where we are now and where are we going,” says Seftel. “We ask, ‘what are the scenarios out there and what are the possible trajectories?’ And more importantly, we ask, ‘how can we have a positive impact to bring down the COVID-19 numbers?’”

Lundgren says attendance has steadily climbed as the pandemic wears on, as people seek both practical guidance—how to stay safe, wear a mask, etc—as well as a larger perspective on the problem and efforts to solve it. “This content is on the bleeding edge,” she says. “When the pandemic was starting to spread, we were able to give expertise from someone at the front lines. After that first session, in which David warned people not to travel and to do things like cancel cruises, we got some email from members wondering if he’d seemed a bit radical, even a little draconian. But now, of course, they’re getting it. David has been really calm and wonderfully informative, which helps to ease anxiety about it.”

The conversation has gone far beyond hygiene and social distancing, to the complexities of testing, the search for treatments, and the desperate lack of critical data. “Right now we’re plagued by a paucity of proper data,” says Seftel. “We need expanded diagnostics to determine who has been infected and how their immune system has responded. That’s important because we’re learning that getting infected may not guarantee long-lasting immunity. This is of major importance for vaccine development, because a person must produce a sufficient amount of neutralizing antibodies to be protected.”

Seftel has used the weekly updates to give a sense of the broad—and constantly changing landscape of potential treatments, testing and vaccines, and all of the structural and systemic barriers that are impeding progress. “In terms of diagnostics, scalability is critical and must happen in weeks, not months,” he says.

These revelations have sparked a lot of ideas and action from the alumni audience. “HBS alumni are hard-wired to be proactive. We’re used to leading,” says Seftel. “There’s a lot of frustration, and they’re asking, “how can we help?’” Through the Slack channel, alumni are already sharing ideas for how they can respond to the crisis within their own respective industries or specialties and Seftel sees significant potential in such cross-collaboration among HBS alumni.

“The program articulates a forward momentum which builds enthusiasm,” he says. “Alumni can see where their activities can fit in to the effort. But we must align our activities so they are cohesive. Not competition, but cooperation. The need is super ordinate to private gain. In the end, there is a silver lining: we will have a safer, healthier, more community-conscious world.”

All HBS alumni can find the COVID-19 Updates on the HBSANC Facebook page. The most recent update is here: https://bit.ly/COVID7.

More than 80 alumni around the world attended the HBS Healthcare Alumni Association’s Virtual Roundtable (VRT), “Digital Transformation – Facts, Fiction and Beliefs” via Webex on March 24.

Moderated by HBSHAA board member Patricia Carrolo (MBA 1991), the VRT featured speakers Clause Jensen, Chief Digital Officer and Head of Technology, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and information technology author and thought leader Dan Roberts, CEO and President of Ouellette & Associates Consulting, Inc. The conversation explored the challenges healthcare organizations face in designing and implementing effective digital platforms that support a range of functions and stakeholders.

“We talked about what it really means to transition to digital operations,” says Carrolo, the General Manager of IBM's Global Healthcare and Life Sciences Industry. “We looked at the facts and fiction around moving a business to a digital platform and what it means for patients, hospital employees, and the community.”

Held during the emergence of the global Coronavirus pandemic, the VRT was especially relevant, as digital business platforms take center stage in a time of social distancing, says Carrolo. “This happened to be very timely – especially now,” she says. “So we spent some time in the VRT talking about how to prepare digital healthcare systems for a pandemic. Our alumni in health care all around the world were very engaged with the topic.”

The VRT was one of about two dozen webinars held by the HBSHAA every year. Recorded VRTs are available to members via its Healthcast link on the club’s webpage.

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