Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: CareJourney CEO and President Obama’s CTO Aneesh Chopra (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I want to close this segment of our discussion with a question. What, in your mind, are some of the open problems that you would like startups to go solve?

Aneesh Chopra: Let’s go through the healthcare discussion we’ve had and identify a few examples along the way. In my dream world, there should be a series of entrepreneurs competing on the development of a digital health advisor or what I call a health information fiduciary.

This application would be trusted by my mom and dad to connect to all of the source systems that are regulated today to provide that application access to my mom and dad to run a growing library of decision support to say, “Based on what we know, here are the things that need to be done that are going to keep mom and dad healthier longer. Here are things to avoid. Here are some ways in which they can interact with the healthcare system in a more efficient manner.”

That advisor was envisioned by a research team at MIT in the 90’s. They submitted a proposal to DARPA for what was referred to as the Guardian Angel project. We have electronic health records and we have personal health records. We have interoperability standards. These are all inputs to what we need in the form of a digital health advisor.

Today, that digital health advisor doesn’t have an obvious revenue model. How much would my mom and dad pay to have the advisor guide them through this process? Unclear. How much would my mom and dad’s insurance company or doctor pay to extend their offerings already to include these services? Unclear.

I am hopeful that the best and brightest people listening to this will point their energies toward both the data aggregation requirement and, more importantly, the growing library of analytics or measures that you would run. CareJourney can be interpreted as being a benchmarking service provider to that health information fiduciary to connect hypothesis and the decision support with some of the benchmark data.

Sramana Mitra: Why don’t we do CareJourney and come back to this question? I’m a computer scientist from MIT. You must be very aware of some of the work that’s going on in the brain research space. Mental health has not received the level of care and investment as it should have or needs to. That’s certainly an area for gene editing. There’re also all the people who already have mental health issues. Can you do gene editing after the fact? Maybe.

Let’s go to CareJourney first.

Aneesh Chopra: At its core, CareJourney is fulfilling one of the provisions of the Affordable Care Act, which was the release of Medicare data for provider performance measurement. If we look at the current world in which we operate, you and I might look up a doctor on the internet and say, “Is this the right fit for me?”

The current gold standard is that my fellow Americans might enter comments. There’re a lot of that kind of commentary in the physicians ratings world. Or there’s a growing number of insurance companies and others that say, “Trust me. I’ve graded all the doctors.” It doesn’t necessarily instill a great deal of confidence if one can’t objectively interpret the source information that resulted in that recommendation. There had to be a better path.

The better path would be that we will use all the academic literature to ascribe what high-value care looks like. If the government could unlock all of the health data that’s sitting in its four walls, 145 million Americans access healthcare and are generating receipts that are held by the US government. If that could be made accessible to the private sector, CareJourney stood up its hand and said, “We wish to access that information for the purpose of provider performance measurement.”

Our go-to-market approach was to assert a next-generation physician ratings engine powered by publicly-available algorithms that can be run on publicly-available data and disseminated, akin to a Bloomberg data terminal, to a growing list of members who chip in an annual membership fee to access some or all of that information. We aspire to coach our members on how they can use the information to make business decisions.

While I do hope that it will be used in a digital health advisor use case, our current most common use cases are for physician networks to identify high-performing primary care colleagues or specialists. This would apply to markets that are already proven to be highly successful in managing down total cost of care above and beyond what would happen if the individual accessed and used the healthcare system as their neighbors do today.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: CareJourney CEO and President Obama's CTO Aneesh Chopra
1 2 3 4 5 6