The concept of a digital twin started in manufacturing more than twenty years ago. A virtual copy of a physical thing, updating as the physical thing changes, so you can ask questions and predict what is coming. NASA used the idea on Apollo 13 to bring the crew home. Factories use it to catch defects before they ship. Aerospace uses it to test a plane before it ever leaves the ground. Industry 4.0 made it standard.
Healthcare is the laggard. The published research says so. Twenty years after the concept was named, healthcare is still at the beginning. The data is fragmented. The systems do not talk to each other. The patient's voice is barely captured. And the one industry where the stakes are highest, where the physical thing being twinned is a person, is the one furthest behind.
I have been selling and implementing digital twins since 2014, first as an IBMer and then at Verizon. Maximo, IBM's asset management platform, is where the discipline met the factory floor at scale. It is the operating system the reliability community built digital twins on. I walked those factory floors with those customers. In 2022 I stood up the Verizon 5G Innovation Hub at USC's McNair Aerospace Center, in partnership with IBM, Siemens, and Yaskawa. That same year I presented at MaximoWorld with IBM on using AI, 5G, and IoT to detect failures before they happen.
Twelve years in the discipline. Now we are seeing healthcare folks attach their names to digital twins. The conferences are catching up. The vendors are showing up. What is missing is the operating experience.
I bring more than the industrial track record. I am a researcher and sociologist trained in qualitative method. That is the layer manufacturing never had to solve for. It is also the layer healthcare needs most. Around me sits a team built for this. Jennifer Bulandr brings twenty-plus years inside rare disease advocacy. Tom Tully brings the lived experience of pulmonary fibrosis and a transplant, alongside a twenty-five-year pharma career. Usman Fawad builds the AI architecture. Jacob Bulandr brings the data science. Lisa Krefft brings clinical and regulatory experience across therapy, occupational health, wearable technology, and law. Verity Grey is the named AI voice that preceded the system itself.
No one piece is the whole. Together, we are the cross-disciplinary team this problem requires.
