A prescription for precision
Blake Long, AB’82, MD’86, HS’92-’95, MBA’15, has cultivated strong roots at Duke — first as an undergraduate student majoring in health economics and health policy, next as a medical student, and then as a fellow in pediatric cardiology. Decades later, he returned to Duke to get his MBA and now holds a position as an adjunct professor in the Fuqua School of Business. He currently serves as vice president on the executive committee of the Medical Alumni Council.
Long first put on the white coat that marks an MD student’s entry into the profession of medicine in 1982 — and, as he told the incoming medical students at the 2025 White Coat Ceremony, he hasn’t ever taken it off, even though his career has shifted over the years. “Once you put the white coat on and you’re a doctor,” Long said, “you will always be that.”
Change and Innovation
Long worked in private practice as a pediatric cardiologist in Savannah, Georgia, for 20 years. During that time, he became increasingly interested in health care system change and innovation.
“I began to see, after 20 years of practice, how the system didn’t work very well,” Long said. He saw inefficiencies and waste and knew there had to be a better way. “I got frustrated about how the system was so hard on patients trying to navigate it.”
Along the way, Long discovered entrepreneurial activity and investing. He saw the potential for those activities to be a source for positive change in health care. He went back to school for a master’s degree in business administration, completing the Weekend Executive MBA program at Fuqua.
While he was earning his MBA, he decided to quit private practice and moved back to Durham to work for a venture capital group affiliated with Blue Cross North Carolina. After a couple of years, he moved to the entrepreneurial side and began working to advise early startup companies focused on diagnostics.
Currently, Long is back to working as a venture capitalist. At Fuqua, he teaches a course on innovation and investing in health care to first-year MBA students.
His experience has given him a unique perspective on innovation in health care. “The future of health care is precision,” Long said. “Precision in medicine, biology, therapeutics, delivery, and experience.”
Instead of thinking of health care in terms of patient volumes and averages, Long wants to redefine the process to focus on using precision medicine to deliver individualized, targeted care. “We want to have the patient be able to experience it, consume it, and interact with it in a more personalized, precise way,” he said.
Digital health apps and devices, for example, have given people better insights into aspects of their health, helping them monitor their own physical activities, heart rates, sleep patterns, and more, which helps them invest in their own health. That’s a good start, Long said, but it’s only half the battle.
“How do we take that,” Long asked, “and then develop the systems to use all that elegant science in a way that can be delivered well?” Long believes we are moving in the right direction, but it will take more innovation to bring real, meaningful solutions into routine practice. “Until then,” Long said, “it just doesn’t have the impact.”
Opportunities and Challenges
In the 40-plus years since Long put on his white coat, he’s seen innovative changes and major strides in health care. “The tools, drugs, therapeutics, capabilities, and outcomes you can deliver are vastly different than when I started med school. It’s remarkable,” Long said. “Things that we only dreamed about when I was in medical school are now routine.”
Speaking at this year’s White Coat Ceremony, he told the incoming medical students that “what is at our fingertips is remarkable. There’s never been a better time to be in medicine.”
Yet challenges remain. One obstacle has become changes in research funding. The current political landscape is shifting the sources of stable funding available for innovative research. Federal research support has been severely reduced, and thousands of grants have been terminated, leaving researchers scrambling for ways to make up funding gaps.
While funding disruptions are generating stress to the system, Long also sees the situation as an opportunity to expand the way these areas are funded.
“We need to think about private resources and capital as a resource to utilize, to continue the research, and to translate things,” Long said. “Historically, academia has stayed in their single lane, so this is a forcing mechanism to look for collaboration and crossover into other lanes.”
Long believes capital and resources through investments can be a key source of support for science to continue, and Duke is well positioned to make that work. This, he said, will require partnerships with capital resources and collaborations with other hospitals and health care systems.
Long wants to make a real impact in bridging that gap.
“I feel like I still practice medicine,” he said, “but my stethoscope is applied to thousands of patients, not just the 20 a day in the clinic.”
(This story originally ran in the Fall 2025 issue of Magnify Magazine)