The highly anticipated 26th Annual Fogarty Lecture brought together more than 200 innovators, physicians, educators and entrepreneurs to explore cutting-edge ideas in healthcare and technology. This year’s keynote speaker, Catherine Mohr, MD, president of the Intuitive Foundation, captivated the audience with a talk titled “Scale Happens Outside the Box.”
With more than 20 years of experience in strategy, research, product development and organizational change, Mohr’s unique perspective is informed by her work across various industries including robotics, surgery, engineering, aerospace, education and more. Throughout her talk she emphasized how scaling innovation requires bold, interdisciplinary thinking and a departure from conventional approaches.
The Fogarty Lecture series is an annual event designed to inspire dialogue around the latest advances in healthcare and medtech. Each year, healthcare visionaries take the stage and share stories of inventions and leadership that have transformed patient care. Mohr’s address served as a call to action for healthcare professionals and entrepreneurs to leverage technology and collaboration in new ways in order to address global challenges and shape the future of medicine.
Scale Starts on Day One
Throughout her talk, Mohr continually emphasized the idea that scale must be considered from day one. In the early days of launching a new creation, innovators are simply modeling what they think could happen. In this phase they’re working ahead of the evidence, but it’s imperative to lay the groundwork necessary to achieve scale in the future. This was a lesson she learned in her first post-college role, and it became more evident with every new project, position, and industry she tackled.
Mohr never set out to become a doctor. Her journey began at MIT, where she studied mechanical engineering and developed a passion for robotics and the intricate workings of interconnected systems. She thrived on taking things apart and figuring out how to rebuild them better.
This curiosity sparked one of her earliest passions: building and racing solar-powered cars. She was captivated by the challenge of optimizing multiple systems to work in harmony. “We weren’t following a blueprint that someone laid out,” she recalled, as she described the experience of racing cars with her classmates across the Australian desert. “We were building something that hadn’t been built before and that was a revelation for us.”
After college she joined a company called AeroVironment, headed by legendary aeronautical engineer Paul MacCready. Best known for building the Gossamer Albatross, a human powered plane that flew across the English Channel, MacCready’s mantra was “Imagine the impossible and do it.”
While working there, one of Mohr’s first projects involved creating a hybrid electric vehicle for the military. In the 90s there wasn’t a lot of precedence for electric cars, aside from a few prototypes. As part of this project, she created a proposal for an entire charging infrastructure for California. “You cannot scale unless you think about the entire ecosystem something is in,” she said, adding that you must go beyond the exciting part—in this case the electric car—to think about the systems that are necessary to support the invention. “That process starts on day one.”
Her next major project involved developing a solar-powered electric airplane. The challenge was to design it so that it could remain at altitude for six months, enabling it to function as a telecommunications platform. Her team devised a plan to store hydrogen and oxygen in the plane’s wings. Unfortunately, the aircraft crashed near the shores of Kauai on its maiden flight, forcing her back to the drawing board. Realizing it was time for a change, she decided to pivot in a new direction.
From Aerospace Engineer to Medical Student
Mohr took her talents to Stanford University, where she enrolled as a first-year medical student. During her second week, she was invited to scrub in to assist in a bariatric surgery. She was instantly hooked. By the end of her first year, she was scrubbing in for surgery three days a week and watching her classes online in the evenings.
As she advanced in her studies, the idea of applying robotics to surgery began to intrigue her. At the time, her husband worked for Intuitive Surgical, the company behind the da Vinci Surgical System, a robotic platform designed for minimally invasive procedures. One of her mentors, Myriam Curet, MD, was petite, and Mohr was fascinated with the potential of robotics to reduce the physical strain involved in surgery. She proposed they explore the concept together, which led to them co-developing a laparoscopic Roux-en-Y gastric bypass—now a part of the da Vinci system.
This process piqued another curiosity: how physicians develop psychomotor skills and navigate the steep learning curves required for surgical mastery. She began conducting learning curve studies with her fellows, exploring alternative methods of training to improve surgical education.
After graduation she began her next phase of work at Stanford’s Goodman Simulation Center, focusing on the development of simulation-based curricula for training surgeons. Robotics were still in their early phase. “When I jumped on this new path, things looked bleak, as they usually do in the beginning,” she said. Today, almost 30 years from when the original patents were filed, bariatric surgery is performed with a da Vinci robot once every 16.8 seconds.
Scaling Education: New Ways of Learning
Mohr emphasized the need to design scalable solutions that can make a global impact, especially in low-resource settings where access to healthcare remains limited. There are significant portions of the world where robotics technology isn’t penetrating, and it’s primarily due to training deficits. “It’s not that robots aren’t the right technology,” she said. “It’s that these regions need more training.”
Surgery is a cornerstone of global public health. A staggering 310 million major surgeries are performed each year globally, with around 40 to 50 million occurring in the U.S. Deploying surgery is not as easy as delivering a vaccine or antibiotics. It’s an investment in people. Mohr gave the example of building a hospital. Creating the facility can take one or two years but training the people to work there takes closer to ten.
This realization led to her next innovation: creating surgical training programs for these populations. She began to think about how education could be scaled in an exponential way. “How do we go from the ‘see one, do one, teach one’ model to a more scalable model?” she wondered. She noted that while the acquisition of knowledge has been scaled exponentially thanks to the internet, for surgery, it’s psychomotor skills that need to be addressed. “You can’t just read a book about doing an appendectomy,” she said. The key lies in the ability to self-assess, so that doctors can teach themselves and course correct along the way.
In 2018, she created the Intuitive Foundation to address that very problem. She launched a surgical training challenge, inviting physicians to develop training materials that would allow a clinician to learn a new skill from anywhere in the world. They could only use locally available materials to create a simulator that offered built in self-assessment. The winner of the contest built a laparoscopic training program that utilized video and has since been deployed in multiple places, including a hospital in Cameroon where everyone from the resident physicians to the senior clinicians learned laparoscopy together. “That hospital now does seven to nine laparoscopic cases a week,” Mohr reported.
Today, the Intuitive Foundation continues to build surgical training programs. “It’s not done yet,” she said. “But we’re going to build the tools and hand them out and at some point, we’re going to hit that inflection, and we’ll start to see thousands of new clinicians who have been trained in this way giving excellent clinical care.”
Mohr’s presentation reaffirmed that the future of healthcare lies not just in new technologies but in new ways of thinking, working, and collaborating. With the right combination of innovation, education, partnership and tenacity, the possibilities for transforming healthcare are limitless.
Watch the Full Lecture
If you missed the lecture or wish to revisit the discussion, the full recording of Mohr’s presentation will be available on the Fogarty Innovation YouTube channel shortly.