Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: The Garage CEO Pranam Ben (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What about quantifying these use cases and their impact? Have you done anything that you can share with us?

Pranam Ben: Let’s take another use case of ER utilization. One of the things that we’ve struggled with is the over-utilization of emergency rooms in the country. We know what an ER visit costs. That’s been well-established.

Our ability to reduce the ER utilization by 10% to 15% has a direct impact on cost savings. That’s something that we quantify every month. One is the ER utilization.

Then you think about re-admission. When they don’t take their medication on time or due to other such situations, it leads to re-admission, which escalates the cost of care. We have workflows that intervene to minimize or eliminate unnecessary re-admission.

Sramana Mitra: I understand the use case. How do you quantify? What level of impact are your interventions creating?

Pranam Ben: The annual average spend of Medicaid patients is about $10,000. Our ability to quantify and reduce the ER admits and readmits can save up to $200 per patient per year. In any program, you have anywhere from 6,000 to 15,000 patients. You can basically do the math in terms of the cost savings just on eliminating unnecessary or duplicative hospitalizations.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s switch gears a bit. If you were to look around in your space with an innovation lens looking for open problems to solve, what would be some open problems that you see out there that you would steer or point new entrepreneurs towards so they can start new companies addressing those problems?

Pranam Ben: The one thing about technology that I’m very grounded on is that we tend to over-hype the long-term benefits of technology and underestimate the short-term benefits of innovative technology. We ground ourselves in the short-term horizon of what we could do in terms of innovation.

The problems that healthcare is dabbling with today is something that will require a collaborative approach from entrepreneurs all over to help solve these problems. One is about achieving true and complete interoperability. That has been on our wishlist for many years now.

There has been some progress, but we have not reached the steady state of complete interoperability as far as data is concerned. That’s something that will require a collective effort from the entire ecosystem. We should build tools and protocols that will allow for unfiltered data access.

The second problem that I see that will soon become a burning issue is this notion of enabling intelligence at all points of care. Today the patient is not confined to a physician’s office of a hospital bed to receive care. The ability for a tool or data-driven approach to enable access to care 24/7 is going to be a paramount consumer experience demand.

The third dimension is this notion of using big data in healthcare to enable a new era of personalized medicine. Looking at vast data sets and understanding the health of populations and communities in general, and the ability to identify patterns that will then trickle down to the best individualized care for any given patient. That is something exciting. We’re investing in it. These are three trends that I think are going to be game changers.

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: The Garage CEO Pranam Ben
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