Dr. Douglas Sung Won, MD

  Medicine has no shortage of talented operators. We train exceptional clinicians, deploy increasingly sophisticated technology, and continuously refine techniques at the point of care. Yet despite all this progress, the system surrounding care delivery remains fragmented, inefficient, and structurally brittle. We have optimized performance inside silos while neglecting the architecture that connects them. That is the difference between an operator and an architect. Operators work within systems. Architects design the systems themselves. Over the last two decades, I’ve had the privilege of working on both sides of that divide - first as a surgeon pioneering minimally invasive techniques, and later as a builder of vertically integrated healthcare ecosystems. What I learned is simple: the future of medicine will not be shaped by incremental procedural improvement alone. It will be shaped by those who understand healthcare as an engineered system. Healthcare today is not a clinical pr...