Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: William King, CEO of Zephyr Health (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: It seems like Veeva is a big partner of yours.

William King: Yes, Veeva is a great partner. We’ve got several great partners. You talked about customer relationships. That’s exactly the kind of thing that we can help with. Veeva is an important software partner that relates to that engagement. We have data partners like DRG.

We also have partners in multi-channel marketing. Just a face-to-face visit isn’t always the most effective and certainly not the most cost-efficient. How can people learn online and how can they leverage digital medium? Then, we also have partnerships with services companies that are doing good old consulting.

Sramana Mitra: Accentures and all.

William King: Exactly. Consulting is a data-driven business. The more we can enable those people through our API and other views into our system, the more efficient everybody becomes.

Sramana Mitra: One of the things I do in the Thought Leadership series is to lift themselves to a 30,000 foot level. I want you to take off your Zephyr Health hat and put an industry-wide perspective. Tell me what open problems do you see.

It seems like your perspective is very deep in the pharmaceutical data space from the healthcare IT perspective. If you were starting a company today and not running Zephyr Health as you are, what open problem would you solve that has struck you as something that somebody should start a company on?

William King: That’s a great question. At the end of the day, I am a data guy. That’s what I think about. That’s the problems that I get excited about. I see massive opportunity for transformation in healthcare. I think that data is relevant across every category. Certainly in the world that I live in, it is the battle of the ball. The manufacturers and our customers are a very important part of the ecosystem, but they’re just a part.

You’ve identified that there are the insurance companies, the physicians, and patients. What I see as a massive opportunity is in quantified self. What I mean by that is I got a very similar problem to GSK. I am confronted with a lot of information in different silos. Number two, it’s hard for me to figure out what the data is telling me. Number three, even if I’m able to achieve that, it’s very hard for me to find the right person to help me interpret that to help me make a decision.

Quantified self is the ability to connect all of these different kinds of datasets that I have and begin to mach them not only together but also to match that to the different constituents in the ecosystem. An example of this is pretty simple. It takes four visits to the physician on average to find the right doctor. I’m spending time in traffic, then the physician time, and waiting room.

Why is that? Oftentimes, it’s because the physician doesn’t have a lot of advanced information about that patient or the referral networks might be sub-optimal. It might be relationship or human-driven. What quantified self would enable me to do is have a better picture of who I am as a patient. Connect my electronic health record with my DNA. Maybe I’ve got imaging data. Have that in a form that is much more easily pulled together and can be shared in advance.

Number two, predictive algorithms are promising and are growing categorically. We can link that to the physicians. What kind of physician sees a patient with these sort of anomalies or has had good outcome with patients who demonstrate these four or five attributes? That’s a very macro view of where the category is going.

If I was going to start a company around that, I would first step in the quantified self and enable them to do what Zephyr Health does so well today.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: William King, CEO of Zephyr Health
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