Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: CareJourney CEO and President Obama’s CTO Aneesh Chopra (Part 1)

Aneesh offers a thoughtful and comprehensive analysis and vision of the innovation and entrepreneurship opportunities throughout the healthcare system. Fascinating conversation.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s do a little intro and get some background. I know you have a very colorful background.

Aneesh Chopra: I’m a public servant at heart. I had the honor of serving as Virginia’s Secretary of Technology and then as President Obama’s Chief Technology Officer. The opportunity of public service is a chance for those of us in the public and private sectors to come together to solve big problems as more and more of our public sectors become digital. That digital connection allows for many stakeholders to participate and improve the lives of the people we love and trust.

Sramana Mitra: You’re doing a startup now?

Aneesh Chopra: I am. I’m running CareJourney. That’s an extension of my public-private partnership world and my time in government. The premise is that governments are opening up data. In the United States, we’re opening up healthcare data.

Some of that information is available for anyone to download, but there are portions of that that are sensitive. It requires a researcher that gets a security approval to be able to login and access more sensitive information. As a result, CareJourney became a business for purposes of democratizing our analysis of that healthcare information to help people understand what the key drivers of high-value care are.

For mom and dad, it’s about trying to find the highest value doctors to care for the family members we love. CareJourney is not directly speaking with consumers, but we have a membership base of 140 organizations who access our database in order to inform their strategies to improve care delivery.

Sramana Mitra: There are two major buckets under which to cover this conversation. I want to cover the political part of your experience. What is your analysis of where healthcare is in the US and where it needs to go?

Aneesh Chopra: Healthcare in the US scores an A on innovation, on building cures, on developing incredibly exciting clinical services that can help people live longer. We struggle to access those high-value services. The state of the union is to find a way to continue the innovation and the engine that drives change, maybe with more genomics, personalized medicine, and better access to digital services to keep us healthier while we’re in and out of the hospital.

Also doing so at a lower operating cost and in a manner that can be accessible to more people especially in underserved communities. If we make it a priority, I think this decade will be exporting the best of those ideas globally.

Sramana Mitra: What role does preventative medicine play in that? If we can prevent a lot of these things, it will be a lot less expensive to scale and democratize access.

Aneesh Chopra: There are three layers to this. That first layer is a societal question. How do we eat healthier, exercise more, and follow recommended actions? That is an absolute public priority globally. The second layer is, what can we do to detect a health status that’s deteriorating early enough where we can more readily manage that disease and slow down the progression of that disease.

That is an area where we have an all-hands-on-deck effort right now to determine whether earlier detection and better management of disease can result in a reduction in the frequency with which we go to the emergency room or get admitted to the hospital for a more intensive treatment. That is where we think we have the greatest opportunity for savings in the system. That last layer is for those who need it, lifesaving therapies, and curative therapies. We got to find a way to make it more affordable to more people.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: CareJourney CEO and President Obama's CTO Aneesh Chopra
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