Processing Your Payment

Please do not leave this page until complete. This can take a few moments.

October 24, 2018

Health-care disruptors eye patient-data interface

Liese Klein L-r: Andrew Wood, CTO of Fitscript; Ashok Subramanian, CEO of Centivo Health; Sri Muthu, CEO & Managing Founder of Health Venture, and Matthew Katz, CEO of the Connecticut State Medical Society.
By Liese Klein

It’s all about the data. But what good is the data if the patient — or the doctor — won’t engage?

This conundrum of modern medicine was one of the discussion points Wednesday at an event entitled "Innovation and Disruption in Health Care" at the Connecticut State Medical Society (CSMS). The panel, organized by the Greater New Haven Chamber of Commerce, featured executives from CSMS, a startup, a health-care plan and a venture capital firm discussing the interface between technology and consumers.

“Health care is not cool, it’s not fun. You’re sick, you’re scared, you’re emotional. That cannot be simply delivered by a mobile app. There are lots of things technology can do but technology cannot heal the human spirit and solve the anxiety of a sick person,” said Ashok Subramanian, CEO of Centivo Health, a self-funded health plan startup in New York. Innovative health plans need to focus on building trusting relationships with patients, 65 percent of who are “medically homeless,” or lacking a regular provider.

Technology and data collection don’t have to erode that trusting relationship, said Sri Muthu, CEO of the New Haven investment firm Health Venture. Modern consumers are accustomed to having their data tracked by everything from Fitbits to cell phones, he added.

In health care, however, innovation has been constricted by incompatible systems and the industry’s reluctance to share outcomes and other data, Muthu said. “Everybody’s afraid that if I give you all my data, you are going to take all my patients away from me... How do we close the loop?” he said.

If presented in an engaging fashion, data can be used to motivate patients to make positive changes, said Andrew Wood, chief technology officer of New Haven-based Fitscript, an interface for diabetes patients. Fitscript's GlucoseZone digital exercise program has been found to save thousands of dollars in health-care costs for diabetics. “We’re going to give the user a solution they can work with,” Wood said. “We give control back to the patient.”

Employers need to use their position as the main generator of profit in the health-care system to make changes, Subramanian said. “Employers have so much more power than they realize because they are paying the bill.” With the growth of Medicare and Medicaid, employer-sponsored coverage represents an ever-greater share of profits for the health-care system.

“Employers hold the key to unlocking this,” Subramanian said. Employers need to get together in local markets and take a role in designing and promoting high-value, high-quality health plans, he said. “It starts with the data… it starts with using facts, not emotion, to drive where care should be delivered.”

Contact Liese Klein at lklein@newhavenbiz.com

Sign up for Enews

Most Recent

Most Recent

0 Comments

Order a PDF