Richard Dale

The Author

Richard Dale

Richard Dale is COO at Optum Labs, a research and innovation center leveraging big data to find insights to improve patient care and patient outcomes.

Consumerisation of Health Care

I recently featured in a corporate video about the consumerisation of health care. I appear in the last minute or so (only a two minute video).Click here to see it.I think it provides an interesting flavor of some of the thought leadership at Optum (I work for OptumLabs, and...

Richard Dale 08/25/2016

Looking at UK and US Healthcare Systems

Here is a guest post I wrote for Healthblawg's 10th anniversary (with thanks to David Harlow for inviting me to contribute): US and UK Health Systems - Not So Different?

Richard Dale 06/26/2016

Bonuses at Startups

Eric Paley of Founder Collective wrote a great blog post earlier this month: "Bonuses are toxic at startups” (which was later republished on CNN Money). In my years working in VC (the first time I have used this phrase), I found myself in complex situations about bonuses...

Richard Dale 05/11/2013

Back from the Dark Side

As many of my friends know, I recently joined the team at Optum Labs as Chief Operating Officer, located in Cambridge MA, working for the newly appointed CEO, Dr. Paul Bleicher. Also as many of you know, I was fortunate enough to be a co-founder with Paul at Phase Forward....

Richard Dale 04/30/2013

Freudian slip? HP Moonshot: meh

In an article on the website of Tools Journal, about the HP Moonshot line of servers, a typo has the name of the HP CEO written as Meh Whitman (meh defined here). I am jaded about HP, but am I that jaded? Here is the screen shot in case they fix it (they will!).

Richard Dale 04/19/2013

Spring has sprung

It is spring, just about, in New England. There are daffodils blooming in our yard, and I have been riding each Sunday since the beginning of April. The last few weeks have seen some major professional changes (more on that in a future post), and I have found riding on...

Richard Dale 04/15/2013

Big Data and the Internet of Things

I recently wrote about the amazing amount of data being produced by people on the internet or mobile web. For example, every minute, YouTube gets 48 hours of video uploads, and nearly a quarter of a billion emails are sent… yes that’s what people do every minute. However,...

Richard Dale 02/24/2013

Presenting to Win

“Whether you are presenting to investors or to startup competition judges, you are faced with some amount of random behavior.” A while ago I wrote a piece on “How to Score an Investment for your Startup”. Following that theme you can now read “Presenting to Win”, my...

Richard Dale 02/21/2013

Lots of data, all the time

This infographic is already, no doubt, out of date. It is from last June, but was probably out of date in July! People ask where big data comes from. This is a partial answer – as this is “just” data generated on the web and related web-facing activity. However, it starts to...

Richard Dale 02/17/2013

Big data doesn’t mean right answers

My friend Judah Levine sent me a link to this great article in InfoWorld “Big data's pitfall: Answers that are clear, compelling, and wrong”. This reminded me of an article which I really enjoyed from The Atlantic “The Data Vigilante” which is about small data as much as big...

Richard Dale 02/12/2013

15 minutes of fame … in Denmark

A few months ago I was invited to be interviewed about big data by Anders Høeg Nissen of the Danish Broadcasting Corp when he was visiting Boston. Anders is the presenter of Harddisken, a weekly hour-long program about technology, which first started broadcasting in 1994....

Richard Dale 01/25/2013

Happy 2015

Happy 2015… and here are some new year short pieces for you to look at.Julie Zhuo, who I don’t know, has a blog I just found but already love … here are two great posts that really speak to me, especially having spent so much time in startups and now at a big company:...

Richard Dale 01/11/2015

Will your startup be around for the long term?

Who wants to know whether your startup will be around for the long term? Everyone. “Investors want to invest in a company that will be around long enough to have a chance of making money. Customers don’t want to spend time and effort bringing on a new product or service...

Richard Dale 01/15/2013

On Father’s Day: Lessons from my Daughters

For a Father’s Day blog series, I was asked by a friend to write about being the father of daughters… here it is: http://jwa.org/blog/lessons-from-my-daughters Happy Father’s Day!

Richard Dale 06/15/2014

Your business in the Gartner Hype Cycle

I was recently asked to contribute to a series of articles for the Scalable Startups project at UC Berkeley. The first of my articles is now up and available for reading. “Most new businesses that are based on new technology of any kind are at the mercy of the Hype Cycle...

Richard Dale 12/18/2012

Birds singing, sun shining, wheels turning

I am so looking forward to starting riding again. Friends of mine cycle through the winter, and maybe cycling today, but I prefer roads free of snow banks, even when melting (prone to icing in the shade). Today is a foretaste of spring to come, and bike rides to enjoy....

Richard Dale 03/08/2014

Incentives without pricing?

When I get to refilling a prescription on the CVS website I am amused, and then sickened, by the announcement that “Price will vary based on insurance”. When I click on the link “Why can’t you tell me the price?” I get the response in the pop-up as shown in this screen-...

Richard Dale 12/13/2012

Great Business Model Canvas introduction

Strategyzer and the Kauffman Foundation have created a great series of short YouTube videos about using the Business Model Canvas (about which I wrote an intro in Four Reasons for a Business Model). The example presented is for a consumer oriented business, but this tool is...

Richard Dale 09/22/2013

Happy Chanukah

My family, along with many others, is currently celebrating Chanukah, which is a minor Jewish festival made more significant only by its proximity to Christmas. I am blessed with family, friends and good health and am glad to celebrate even as the days get shorter and...

Richard Dale 12/11/2012

Choose Life

There is a verse in the Bible which includes the exhortation “I call heaven and earth as witness today, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life!” I have always loved that verse because of the very active emphasis on the word...

Richard Dale 09/07/2013