The doctor hired to design the Health X-Prize — and the meetings where the ecosystem argument was road-tested
This is Jonathan Hare's account, with its provenance shown. The person or organization named has not yet claimed or corrected it.
Vijay Goel, MD — ex-McKinsey healthcare-consumerism specialist — was hired in January 2009 as the X PRIZE Foundation's Senior Director of Healthcare Prize Development, to design the foundation's first health prize: a $10M+ competition to demonstrate a 50%+ improvement in a community's health outcomes on the same funds. The correspondence that opened the relationship survives verbatim (S-122): Esther Dyson made the connection, Jonathan Hare met with him repeatedly, and Hare's 2009 argument in the thread — that healthcare's systemic problems yield to fostered ecosystem collaboration rather than head-to-head competition — is the Catalyst thesis, stated to the prize's designer a decade and a half before this record formalized it. Goel's own published timeline (S-123) closes the arc: the program was put on hold amid federal Health Reform uncertainty in 2010.
There is no single root. This is one view of the graph, from this node — what you see depends on where you enter and what you are looking for.
Founder of the X-Prize Foundation — looking for a health prize that was harder to name than genomics
Open →connected throughPC Forum's convenor; a longtime champion and investor across Hare's companies; the corridor personified
Open →in the thread withBerkman Center, the 1999 commission — and a witness in the room in 2008
Open →Everything above is a distillation. The primary source is published in full, so that any claim on this page can be walked back to what was actually said — and where the two differ, the source governs.
The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →Primary source · S-122The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →Primary source · S-123The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →This entry is deliberately incomplete. The gaps below are the things only certain people can settle — and settling one is a contribution like any other: recorded, timestamped and attributed to whoever made it.
Correct anything wrong, add what only you know, or claim this entry as your own. Write to evidence@qpncatalyst.io and Jonathan directly (both are on the button) — a timestamped confirmation comes back with your submission attached, as your own independent record. No account, no permission, no institutional standing required.
Public contributions earn Publicity Premium; bringing others who were there earns Cascade Premium. Everything is valued retrospectively as outcomes verify, so nothing has to be priced up front.
Correct this entry → Add a story, photo or link → Browse the graph →