Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Kristen Valdes, CEO of b.well Connected Health (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What portion of your solution is productized versus custom-designed through professional services?

Kristen Valdes: We are committed to being a technology platform and not a service company. There are customizations that our client needs because they’re at various stages of maturity in the technology they have internally. We try to limit that. Our team is focused on KPI and OKR where we have feature flags that can be turned on or off because our customers are at different stages of readiness.

We align our product to access to data, personalized insights, proactive communications, and access to care. That access to care is in-person, virtual, and digital. We can integrate with the core systems of today’s healthcare environment bidirectionally including EMRs, claims adjudication systems, and eligibility systems. Because data is so fundamental to what we’re doing of being FIRE-first – the standard by which healthcare data is going to be transacted around the world – we are actually quite ahead by bringing in legacy systems and then, we also make open infrastructure out which is why we can aggregate solutions quickly. We’re all about being productized.

There are a lot of conversations around digital transformation with our customers that we support in helping them to prioritize based on their readiness. Not all providers and payers are ready for a technology to deploy a customer-friendly experience.

Take for example provider directories. Right now, one of the hardest things for people to do is find a doctor and then be able to access care through that doctor. That’s because provider directories were historically utilized to provide insurance companies with something called network adequacy. It just means, do I have enough doctors to be in your network where a patient could be within a 20-minute drive time? That means provider directories are updated once a year when it’s time to credential or recredential a doctor.

When you think about changing the use of those types of files, data now needs to be updated daily. We need to expand data that’s collected. Today most provider directories do not capture race and sex. If I’m a newly-pregnant Black mom, I might be searching for a OB-Gyn who’s a Black female. Most provider directories today can’t support that. There’s a transformation that happens on the side of our customers. At the same time, we’re trying to deliver the capability directly to consumers in a new workflow. That’s why it’s called transformation as we’re still in our infancy of moving towards consumerism in healthcare.

Sramana Mitra: There are a few things that stand out for me. One is, there is a tremendous amount of consumerization opportunity within digital health. There is that issue that the consumer is receiving the value, but the payer or the provider is paying for the technology infrastructure to create that value. That creates a bit of a sales cycle issue in the adoption of this kind of technology. That’s number one.

You’ve provided insights into how you’re managing that and how you are rolling out your functionality and transformation solutions. The other thing that I’m thinking about is the question I asked you about product vs service. It sounds like you have modularized the different functionalities that are recurring themes. You are turning those blocks on and off as people desire. Tell me a little bit about the company.

Kristen Valdes: b.well was created six years ago after a personal experience with my own child. I had the good fortune of being a healthcare executive for the last two decades. I’ve had some unique opportunities in my career. I’ve gotten to work both with the centers for Medicare and Medicaid on underserved population and building out algorithms across the country to look at how value-based care should really be delivered. Then I got the opportunity to build a healthplan – a private Medicare advantage plan focused on the chronically ill senior population. That was acquired by United Healthcare where I stayed on as an executive for many years. 

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Kristen Valdes, CEO of b.well Connected Health
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