Glen Salow believes medical innovation is the key to bringing hope and health to the planet. That’s why he’s investing in UCF’s College of Medicine.
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Salow led global technology and customer service teams at Ameriprise Financial and was chief global information officer at American Express. Together, he and his wife Rosemary first supported the medical school through scholarships because they wanted to provide more UCF-trained physicians to the community, who would be able to pick their specialty based on their passions, rather than the need to pay off huge medical school debt. The Salows have now committed $6 million to the College of Medicine, including $1 million to foster medical technology that will improve physician education, research and patient care.
“I know this sounds lofty, but we are at a junction where technology and medicine coming together can address the most basic problems that plague the world,” Salow says.
Harnessing Technology for Good
You could say a stalled commuter train in New Jersey during the 1970s sparked Salow’s passion for technology.
He was working as an accountant with Hess. He dropped Rosemary at the train station every morning and picked her up at night as she commuted to Newark for work. One day, the system stalled, so he was stuck at work for hours waiting for her train to arrive. Bored, he found a tech manual for a data organizer/computing tool used long before PCs. He read it cover-to-cover and realized he could create code to do many of the accounting mechanisms he was doing by hand. Salow presented his discovery to his bosses, who quickly assigned him to computerize their entire business.
He then served in senior technology roles at Aetna and Lehman Brothers before joining American Express as senior vice president of technology infrastructure and then global chief information officer. He retired in 2012 as executive vice president of service delivery and technology and chief information officer of Ameriprise Financial.
Salow knows that technology can bring fears — of displaced workers, impersonal customer service interactions, invasions of privacy. Such worries have happened through history, he says, pointing to how the telephone caused doubters to say the nation could never hire enough phone operators to make the new technology work.
“But as tech evolves, so do other systems,” he says. “In the U.S. we are innovative and flexible. We find ways to make things work.”
Technology and Healthcare Access
Salow believes the world’s problems start with a “lack of hope.” People feel hopeless, he says, when they are not personally secure — with sufficient food, housing and physical well-being — and do not have the opportunity to improve their lot in life.
Marrying technology with medicine is a factor in addressing hopelessness by providing expanded wellness and health opportunity to everyone, Salow says. He describes a future where AI and technology allow a patient to connect with their doctor anywhere, anytime. Technology can be developed so every patient can download their vital signs from a phone, send pictures of their injury or rash, and attend a virtual clinic appointment. AI can help advise their physician on the most likely diagnosis. The doctor can send in a prescription or treatment order via the internet. “We can’t train enough doctors to care for everyone,” he says. “But we can use technology to provide concierge medicine for all and help people in Appalachia, in remote villages in Nigeria. As the internet expands worldwide, we can bring health to the globe.”
Space medicine — an emerging research area at UCF’s College of Medicine — will create new health innovations for patients on Earth, he says. With an increasing number of space travelers going to the moon and beyond, medicine must design systems to diagnose and treat health problems for astronauts in isolated capsules where simple emails can take hours to send and receive. Discoveries of how to use technology for intergalactic medical care can be applied to isolated areas of the globe.
“With technology, we can also get ahead of disease,” he says, “and develop predictive scans and tests. By preventing disease, we can improve the quality of life globally — another step to bringing hope.”
Developing such technologies will require healthcare to use what he calls the Space X model, where users of technology and those who create those systems work on the same teams, providing ongoing feedback and ideation for solving problems.
Salow serves on the Dean’s Advisory Council at the College of Medicine. “Glen is a true friend of the College of Medicine and the university,” says Dr. Deborah German, vice president for health affairs and medical school dean. “At this moment in time, as we seize the opportunity to advance technology and engineering in healthcare, Glen has become a strategic partner. We benefit from his knowledge, experience and resources. I am grateful for all he brings to us.”
Salow considers himself as an “opportunity catalyzer,” and says he believes UCF has the opportunity to be a global leader in the medical technology field.
“Your medical school is young enough and small enough to be nimble,” he says. “We are at a crossroads. We have the opportunity to build something extraordinary.”
