If you ask anybody in the United States, they will most likely say that our healthcare system is deeply dysfunctional. So what are we going to do about it?
Hey everybody, this is Chris Brandt, here with Sandesh Patel. Welcome to another FUTR podcast.
Today I have with me Carolyn Ward, Director of Clinical Strategy at Particle Health, where she is responsible for developing the clinical product roadmap for the organization, ensuring that providers and patients are represented throughout the research and development process.
Carolyn feels that a large part of the problem is access to data. Particle's modern API platform is designed to enable simple and secure access to actionable patient data to prevent digital friction and to promote positive patient outcomes. She also has some thoughts on what the future of healthcare may look like.
So let's hear it directly from Carolyn
Welcome Carolyn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/carolynleeward/
https://www.particlehealth.com/
Click Here to Subscribe:
FUTR.tv focuses on startups, innovation, culture and the business of emerging tech with weekly podcasts featuring Chris Brandt talking with Industry leaders and deep thinkers.
Occasionally we share links to products we use. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases on Amazon.
If you ask anybody in the United States, they will most likely say that our healthcare system is deeply dysfunctional. So what are we going to do about it?
Hey everybody, this is Chris Brandt, here with Sandesh Patel. Welcome to another FUTR podcast.
Today I have with me Carolyn Ward, Director of Clinical Strategy at Particle Health, where she is responsible for developing the clinical product roadmap for the organization, ensuring that providers and patients are represented throughout the research and development process.
Carolyn feels that a large part of the problem is access to data. Particle's modern API platform is designed to enable simple and secure access to actionable patient data to prevent digital friction and to promote positive patient outcomes. She also has some thoughts on what the future of healthcare may look like.
So let's hear it directly from Carolyn
Welcome Carolyn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/carolynleeward/
https://www.particlehealth.com/
Click Here to Subscribe:
FUTR.tv focuses on startups, innovation, culture and the business of emerging tech with weekly podcasts featuring Chris Brandt talking with Industry leaders and deep thinkers.
Occasionally we share links to products we use. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases on Amazon.
If you ask anybody in the United States, they will most likely say that our healthcare system is deeply dysfunctional. So what are we going to do about it? Hey, everybody. This is Chris Brandt here with another future podcast. Today I have with me Dr. Carolyn Ward. director of clinical strategy at Particle Health, where she is responsible for developing the clinical product roadmap for the organization, ensuring that providers and patients are represented throughout the research and development process. Now, Carolyn feels that a large part of the problem is access to data and particles. Modern API platform is designed to enable simple and secure access to actionable patient data to prevent digital friction and to promote positive patient outcomes. She also has some thoughts on what the future of healthcare may look like. So let's hear it directly from Carolyn. Welcome Carolyn. Thank you for having me. Oh, thanks for being on. I mean, you know, we've been, uh, you know, what people don't see is we've been chatting about healthcare here for a while. And complaining about various things that drive us nuts personally, uh, but we wanted to save some of that for the show. So here we are. Um, so, so Carolyn, tell me, you know, what do you see as, you know, deficient in this healthcare space in America? Like what's, what is it that causes it to be so frustrating and broken?
Carolyn Ward:Yeah, absolutely.
Chris Brandt:What's not broken? question, right?
Carolyn Ward:Yeah. What's not broken in healthcare? Yeah. Exactly. So, I mean, I think from my kind of little slice of the pie, one of the big things that I really think about, um, is of course data access. And one of the reasons why I think a lot about this is, When you go into a physician today, right? I'm a primary care physician. So when patients come in to see me, I don't know anything about them for the first time. They basically fill out 15 pages of paperwork, uh, telling me about their medical history. Hopefully they remember everything that has ever happened to them in any healthcare encounter ever. Hopefully they remember every single medication they're on and why they're taking it and who prescribed it to them and when, um, hopefully they know every piece of their family history. And then I come in and they, we have a conversation and hopefully they're able to basically pinpoint all the most important facts, uh, in a 20 minute visit. And I think it's pretty clear from that, that that does not actually happen. And it's really an unfair expectation to levy on patients that they become. the portability part of their data access, right? It is really, right now, on patients
Chris Brandt:Sneakernet, like we also used to say. That's like, carry your data around, use the sneakers to get there.
Carolyn Ward:Exactly. And we are really asking patients to bring their data in their brains and their memories from one physician to another, from inpatient to outpatient, primary care to specialist. And that's just not a great way to do things. Um, and I think, especially as we're starting to move forward We're seeing a lot of physicians specialize. We're seeing, um, people going in and out of different health systems. You know, there's so many places you can get healthcare now. You can get it at your pharmacy. You can get it, uh, at an urgent care, at a primary care place, at a specialist's office. You can get it in the ER. You can get it in the hospital. There's telehealth, digital health apps. There's just so many routes where patients are able to get medical advice. get medications, get diagnoses, get treatments, that the ability to connect those pieces of data, which all live in different EHRs and software platforms, by the way, the ability to pull those pieces of data together and create an accurate and comprehensive understanding of who this patient is, what is going to happen to them so that you can actually intervene in a timely fashion, is pretty much impossible in today's healthcare system.
Chris Brandt:Yeah, well, it's funny you mentioned. I mean, like, in the area I'm in, I have so many different health care providers. I mean, I've got, like, in the Chicagoland area here, we've got, you know, Northwestern University health care system. We've got North Shore. We've got, uh, we've got University of Chicago. We've got Lurie's, right? And, you know, my kids. You know, have doctors and different things. I have doctors and different things and like they all use the same stuff for the most part, but they're like different instances of it. It's like, Oh, I'm going to go over to my chart here, but I can't see my stuff from this my chart or this my chart. And it's like data is all over the place. And you're right. I would go into the doctor and spend most of the time just recapping everywhere else we've been.
Carolyn Ward:Absolutely. And it's also really interesting because you think about, you know, the advent of patient portals. So, um, you know, there's so many ways seemingly to access your data, but there isn't really a easy frictionless way to see all of your data and make sense of it. And that's true for patients just as it is for physicians, right? Um, and. When you kind of pair that with this other shift in our industry around value based care, meaning we want to tie financial incentives to patient outcomes. Um, and there's all these different care models that have been developed and innovated on to try to get these two things aligned in a way that. organizations can be successful in delivering cost effective care that is also high quality and produces these high patient outcomes. A huge, huge barrier to that, in my mind, is the ability to access and understand complete data. Because if, as a value based care organization, you are responsible for this whole patient, everything that happens to them, good or bad, you are saying, I'm willing to take responsibility for. If you don't understand 50 percent of the encounters, or if you don't even have access to, you're not even aware of 50 percent of the encounters that that patient is actually having throughout the healthcare system in the United States. There is no way that you can accurately risk stratify them and understand what they actually need. And therefore, there's no way that you're going to be able to intervene in a timely manner. Um, and we see this all the time, right? There's so many times where patients come in, they're like, Oh, sorry, doc, I missed our visit last week because I was in the hospital. And like, if they hadn't come in to see me, there's no way I would have known they were in the hospital.
Chris Brandt:You could go to the hospital and you need a follow up visit, but you can't get one for like six months. You're like, I mean, my, my mother has a famous line about this. She always says to them, she's like, well, I'll either be better or dead by then. Yeah. That does, you know, cause concern with, with some of the people on the other end of the phone. But
Carolyn Ward:I hope so. But that's true, right? A lot of it is. It's, you know, the, the physician who's seeing you in the hospital, the hospitalist says, Hey, I'm going to need you to follow up in the next one or two weeks with your primary care physician. Now the onus is on the patient to reach out to their physician, hopefully get an appointment in a timely fashion. And the physician now has to see them and ask them, Oh, what were you in the hospital for? Right. Right. What happened there? Um, maybe they can get a fax from the hospital with the discharge summary, a new list of meds, and then they have to kind of basically piece together what they think happened and what they need to do moving forward to prevent this person from going back to the hospital. Um, and I think that's, That's really difficult, both for patients and physicians, because it's so hard to do in our system.
Chris Brandt:We talk about data in healthcare a lot. I mean, you mentioned that, you know, like, you know, we have all these like little pods of data and like, we don't, we're not integrating them in a meaningful way where we can really draw information from. And, and, and the patients, the, the, the, the medical information carrier device that just goes around, uh, a very imperfect one. What are we missing out on? What could be happening with that data instead of what we got now?
Carolyn Ward:Yeah, totally. I mean, I think one of the most exciting areas that I'm interested in when it comes to being able to. Basically create like a comprehensive profile of a patient is if you think about creating basically a data digital twin of, um, looking at all the different data that somebody generates across the healthcare system, right? So that could be your blood pressure measurements. That could be lab values. Um, providers that you see, it could also be trends in a lot of those things, like how often you see certain providers, where you go to, uh, um, geographically to see them, uh, where you get certain types of care, obviously, like new diagnoses that are generated, your disease progression, things like that. What you can actually start to do is create a risk profile of understanding. What is this person like? Where are they right now in their care journey? What has happened to them in the past and use that to predict what they are most likely at risk for? And then obviously from that understanding what you can actually intervene on, right? Not all risk can be mitigated, obviously. Um, but if you don't even understand what the risk is, you'll never get to the point. In an effective way of what should I be doing to help this patient right and when we think about all the actions that we expect physicians to take in the healthcare system, we don't have a great way to stack rank them if there's 10 things I need for this patient to do and I can only do five. which five am I supposed to do, right? What's going to help them to live longer? What's going to improve their quality of life? We don't know a lot of those answers. And I think that creating these type of data models can help us to get there. If you think about the way we do this right now in the healthcare system as a physician is we have a ton of different risk scores. So I may say, Hey, based off what I talked about today, I feel like this person might have heart disease. They might need to be on a statin. So I take all their piece of information and I put it into the ASCVD calculator, which tells me what their risk for heart disease is in the next 10 years. Right. Um, it could be something urgent, like, Hey, they're having chest pain. I use the Timmy score to tell me how likely they are to have a bad outcome. Uh, we can use like the perk score for if we think this person has a PE, you know, we have these one off scores for like. a bunch of different scenarios, um, where the physician says, I think this might be applicable. Um, let me put in their information and this will tell me their risk for this one thing. What I really want to see like comprehensive data access do is basically create like a network or web of all of those things. So instead of it being on the physician in that one moment to say, I want to. apply this one calculator to this patient and get some kind of output, we can have like a constantly refreshing risk profile that is always telling you what needs to be done, what is the most important, what could happen to this patient, um, so that you can direct your resources effectively.
Chris Brandt:Medicine has become so specialized that, um, you know, and, and I, I love, I love data. I love to look at the data. Like what, how far am I off this mark? Am I off that mark? You know, like what, and what does that mean? And the problem gets to be that, you know, you'll, you'll do a series of tests, but you go into a doctor who's very specialized for something and they'll only look at the, the piece of it that relates to their field, not necessarily how that impacts other things. And, and, and, and they don't. And they don't sometimes even want to hear about it's like, I don't know anything about that. That's you got to talk to somebody else about that. Right. And, and, and, but those could have very interesting, you know, things going together. And like, you know, I, I've got some like odd things. I mean, I have like, um, I have a, a rare disease in Dupuytren's contracture, you know, the Viking Vikings disease, you know, so I've got some sort of. thing there that is poorly understood, right? I'm one of those people who Tylenol and Advil do not work on. It like has zero effect on me. You know, I have a lot of like, I'm, I cannot be numbed up either. Like Novocaine doesn't work on me. It's like, I would love to know, like, If, given that, like, is that, like, what's, what does that mean? You know, my body, you know, my, my, you know, I have a, I have a grandfather who had an inverted heart, you know, his heart was on the other side of his chest or something like that. You know, so, like, I'm like, you know, I've got this weird family history, I've got these things, I've got, you know, all this, I mean, like, and, and nobody, Once it's like, yeah, I don't know. I think about that. I'm like, but I'm like, these are kind of big things that I think are leading indicators of other things that, you know, the, the, the function of my systems, you know, it's all a complex dynamic system. And I feel like if nobody's looking at the totality of that, I'm not, I'm missing a lot, you know, and I don't have the skill to do that, you know, and I don't know that there is a doctor that has the skill to do that right now. You know, it's a lot.
Carolyn Ward:Yeah. I mean, totally. I think you're really, yeah. Uh, pinpointing something I think is really interesting and important, which is, you know, back in the day, there were physicians who made house calls, right? They came into your house with a little black bag. They saw every single member of your family. They birthed your children. Um, and that really was because back in the day, like everything that they could possibly do for you fit into that one tiny black bag. And that's just not the case today, right? We know so much more about medicine, genetics, epigenetics. There's just so much. to know that I think it's really hard to expect one person to know all of that in their brain and be able to apply it to hundreds and thousands of patients, which are all going to present differently, right?
Chris Brandt:And, right. And on the flip side, the doctors don't have enough time to do that because now they're, they're all owned by private equity and they've got like a quota they got to rush through. And we created all these immediate care facilities that were supposed to free up all that time for the doctors to do this analysis. But they're, they're struggling to make ends meet just, you know, like seeing enough patients in a day. So like. It's a, it's a difficult situation we're in right now.
Carolyn Ward:Absolutely. And I think, you know, getting back to the point about this specialization, primary care physicians are supposed to be the ones that basically take all the input from the different specialists and put it all together, put all the puzzle pieces together to create one picture. And for sure, they don't have the time. to do that today. Um, but there's also just like not enough physicians. And so, um, there's a really commonly quoted, uh, paper at this point that basically says by 2034, we could have a shortage of upwards of 48, 000 primary care physicians in the United States. 2034 is not that far away. There's like, I'm pretty sure no way to even increase medical school and residency spots to fill that gap. And I think One of the things I'm really looking for the health tech industry to do to fill that shortage is what are the pieces of technology we can develop to scale primary care physicians, not just so, you know, not just so they can see one more patient a day, right? Like, I think there's a lot of things that we've tried to say, Hey, if you adopt this. your, your physician can see two more patients a day. Like that's not going to be enough. Like, let's be honest. Right.
Chris Brandt:No. And it doesn't happen either. I mean, I talked to my primary care physician. He's like, I, it's like, I, I'm supposed to be having all this time and I have no time anymore because all these other things then hit me. Yeah. And you know, he's. He's like, I'm struggling to make ends meet here, you know, it's like that seems crazy to me.
Carolyn Ward:Absolutely. And it's, we're at this really interesting place in medicine where we know so much, we have the ability to do so much, but the actual operational workflows in healthcare are so backwards that. We're trying to bridge these two worlds together, and they're so far apart right now, and I feel like data can be that bridge.
Chris Brandt:You know, there's two sides of this, too. I mean, there's sort of the insurance side, the financial piece of this, and sort of, like, the medical science. side of this too. And, you know, and I see, you know, there's a lot of companies on the insurance side that are now starting to get into the, the care side of it too, where you have these conflicting interests.
Carolyn Ward:Absolutely. And, you know, the other interesting thing about, because we're absolutely starting to see the kind of payer and provider worlds merge with, you know, what we call payviders, people who are doing kind of both. Right. Um, and also just value based care generally as a care model is really about bringing these two parties as closely together as possible, even if they are two separate entities or arms. Um, and to me, like patient risk is. Where the circle overlaps the most between the two of them, right? Because patient risk obviously has to do with clinical outcomes. Um, what could this person develop that we could have prevented? What are the bad outcomes we could have prevented? But it's also extremely expensive. So it, you know, insurances care about that too. And, you know, to your point, I think when it comes to patient risk stratify this person, that to me is a data problem. Right. And you can build models off of this. And some companies today, they do have some models that they're using that say, okay, if you've been to the ER more than this many times, if you've been to, you know, the hospital this many times, if you've developed X, Y, and Z diseases, if you know, whatever it is, they put these different factors into a model and say, that makes you high, medium or low risk and that kicks off certain operational workflows. But that inherently is a data problem. And if you are missing huge chunks of data for that patient. You will not be able to risk stratify them properly. And what ends up happening is you say, Oh, I think this person's actually doing really well. You know, he hasn't come in to see me recently. He, uh, I only have that. He's on like two medications and he's only got like a couple of chronic diseases, but they're well controlled. And you're like, okay, great. Low risk. I don't need to reach out to that guy. But it turns out that he hasn't come to see you because he's been in and out of the hospital. He lost his health insurance. His three diseases have become five. They've become late stage. Um, he can't afford any of his medications, right? We know inherently that person's going to be extremely high risk for something bad happening to them. And it's really about how can we use data to scale that understanding across the board for everybody in the United States?
Chris Brandt:You know, the flip side of what I was just talking about before is that maybe You know, a, a person, person's reached their end of life, and we just have to recognize the fact that this is sort of an end of life process and not, you know, dump a ton of resources into this treatment that's not gonna be effective, too. You know, that's, that's a whole nother side of it. And, and like, I don't know that we You know, it all looks from the view of the patient, you know, obviously you want to save every, every, you want to, you want to have everything done to save your loved one or yourself or whatever, but sometimes it's not entirely practical either. Um, but, you know, like, without the transparency and the data to be there to like. You know, like help people fundamentally understand, you know, what the options are. I don't see that, you know, working well. What is particle doing? I mean, I know you've got a lot of really cool plans and platforms and just you're amassing a lot of interesting data. I mean, could you talk about like how, how. A particle solves this problem.
Carolyn Ward:Yeah, absolutely. So what we have right now is we have an API that basically connects into the national network. So you would as a provider, a process, a patient's demographics, and we would use our intelligent record locator service to go out and basically look for their data across the United States healthcare system. Right. And so, you know. Me as an example, I used to live in New Jersey. So a lot of my healthcare data lives in New Jersey, but I'm out in California now. Um, and so being able to understand like where data lives on the networks and then basically pull that all together and deduplicate it, standardize it, enrich that data, and then be able to pass it back to physicians at four point of care use, um, has kind of been one of our core value props. Uh, I would say, however, that one of the kind of. Other interesting pieces of this is that yes, we definitely have physicians out there who want to see the data, get that rich clinical context so that they make sure that they understand the decisions that they're making in the right context, which of course is really important. Something I value a lot as a physician as well. But there's also just a lot of data, right? And so we don't want to be passing through data where physicians are having to Sift through ten years worth of data to find what they need. And I think what that really speaks to is a couple of things. The first thing I would say is, Uhm, what are the insights that we can lift about trends. So, if you think for example, like the example I often give is about wearable devices. So, if you have an Apple watch for example. And it's tracking your heartbeat, right? I do. And it's so much for joining us. You could send that to your physician, which patients have done to me, and I'm like, I see your heart rate for the last three weeks, but I have no context to interpret that. Like, were you exercising? Were you sleeping? Like, those are important things to know when I'm looking at your heart rate. And so, that's like a great instance of like how that. is not really that valuable because it's data with no context. The interesting thing that the Apple HealthKit does, though, is it shows you trends over time, right? So it'll show you, for example, um, if you've taken a certain number of steps per day, but it'll also show you if your average number of steps trending over the last week has changed from the previous week. It will show you if your heart rate variability has changed week over week. And I think it's actually looking at those trends. That is more, much more valuable because even without the exact context, we know that, hey, if something is trending in a certain way, we can generally understand if that's good or bad. There's a lot of work still to be done in that area, but I use that as an example of kind of how I think about clinical data as a whole, right? Is we don't want to just inundate people with all of this data and be like, Good luck. Hopefully you can find something from this. We are actually in the business now of creating a data platform with the insights built on top so that we can just ready and serve that over to you, um, and give you a good understanding of like, hey, is this patient due for certain things? Are we seeing some like strange trends in their data? Um, And I think that that's really important. And part of, uh, some of the recent data analysis we've been doing is really looking at how people are utilizing the healthcare system and how their data is being moved around in the healthcare system, which I think is also really interesting, both from, um, an insurance or payer side and also from a physician side of understanding how are people actually accessing healthcare data and how does that actually affect the kind of care that they get and the risk. Like their risk profile, essentially.
Chris Brandt:So what kind of things are you seeing on that front?
Carolyn Ward:So, I mean, I think that there's some really, um, common things that people would think about. So, for example, we know if you go to the ER all the time, probably not a good thing, right? But there's a lot of reasons why that might happen. You might be, one, maybe you're just very unlucky and accident prone. Two, maybe you have like a very end stage disease that isn't being well managed or three, maybe you don't have health insurance. So you get all of your healthcare in the ER, right? You get your vaccines in the ER. You, you know, you get all of your prescriptions renewed in the ER. Um, and so I think a lot of, um, what I'm really interested in teasing out in the data is how do we think about that context, right? Like, what are the data elements that give us the right context to interpret these trends? That we're seeing. Yeah. Um, and ultimately, you know, what we want to do is, you know, from my perspective, that's very interesting. But when it comes to actually developing products, we think about in, there's a lot of players in the healthcare space, right? We've got point of care physicians, we've got clinical quality folks, we've got care coordinators and care navigators. We've got payers, we've got some overlap and responsibilities from those parties, and understanding for each of these different groups of people who all need to come together to take care of this one patient, what are the things that they are interested in seeing because those are the things that they're going to act on, right? Um, and I think this is pretty in line with how the industry is moving as well, which is that it can't all be on the physician.
Chris Brandt:I'm, I'm a classic example of just like, I don't go to doctors because they tell me things I don't want to hear, you know, so I'm just, I'm the worst and I know better. I know better, right? I would love for there to be more trending analytical data that I can see in conjunction with my, you know, like, uh, you know, I would love to have like one of those continuous. You know, glucose monitors just, you know, like to be able to, you know, stick it on and, you know, for a week and just see what's happening, you know, maybe I'm like feeling run down or this, that, or, you know, whatever, maybe, maybe there's something going on there, you know, it'd be great to have that sort of telemetry that I could share with the doctors and I, I see the possibility of that, but I don't, you know, it's hard because I don't know that they have, you know, like you said, they don't want to get inundated with like all this, you know, just useless telemetry data of, you know, I mean, like, you know, that's a hard thing to handle, like in, you know, um, technology and corporate IT, all that telemetry, you know, like getting all that from a million, you know, patients is, is going to be mind numbing.
Carolyn Ward:Absolutely. And it's one of the, there's, you know, a lot of times because we have all these different wearables and CGMs, to me from the consumer patient side, that to me is really an indication that people really are interested in their own data. Yeah. And they actually want more of it because they want to understand. They don't want to go to the physician and for them to say, Hey, I want to lose weight. I got a CGM. It's been showing me these spikes. Like what should I do? And the physician says you need a diet and exercise. Exactly. Yeah. Maybe that. But like, Hey, why don't you diet and exercise? Yeah. Right. And like the truth is like, what does that actually mean when you say I need to go on a diet? Okay, we're going to go low carb. So does low carb work for every single person? No. Right. Uh, does it mean you go high fat? Does it mean you go high protein? Like, what does that actually mean?
Chris Brandt:And do diets even work?
Carolyn Ward:Yeah. Long term. And what kind of exercise should I be doing? Just pure cardio? Cardio is strength. How much? Right. And I think there's actually a hunger on the consumer side. to get really specific about what will work for me as an individual. And the truth is we just don't know. And I do think like that also is a data problem. And to me, like that is basically bridging precision medicine or personalized medicine into primary care, which is another like big interest of mine, which is essentially saying, you know, in the oncology space today, you have a bunch of precision medicine diagnostics that tell you Uh, if you take this test, how likely you are to have this cancer, what type it's going to be, what kind of markers it's going to be, and then that tells you what's likely to happen, how aggressive. And then you also have a bunch of precision medicine, um, tests that tell you like, hey, if you have this type of cancer, this is the treatment you should be on, right? There's actually a lot of companies that do this like treatment matching today. And I would love to be able to pull that into the primary care space. So for the most chronic things, not rare diseases, the least rare, the most common things. What will work for this one person, right? So, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, heart disease, uh, obesity, diabetes. What's going to work for this person? What kind of diet? What kind of exercise? What kind of medications? What kind of other interventions will give this singular person the best outcome? And that's something that I I believe that data can get us there and we need more and more companies having access to this data to be able to do research and to build those kind of models.
Chris Brandt:Yeah. And that leads to other, you know, bigger societal changes maybe too. I mean, you know, like you mentioned sort of the big ones, obesity, you know, cholesterol, you know, diabetes, you know, like all those kinds of things that are just like endemic throughout the United States. Is this, you know, like if we have the data that we can make the case, it's like, maybe this is something that's, you know, in the food supply that we're, we're, we're being presented with that needs to be, you know, there needs to be legislation around to change that to, you know, improve those outcomes. I mean, it's, it's, it's, there's a lot of questions that we can't answer because they're just like not collecting that data. And, and, you know, when I look at the doctors, the way they, they. They're looking in the notes, you know, this is like unstructured data at its finest, you know, it's like, you're gonna have to parse through all those notes to collect that information to and, and, you know, like, normalize that so that, you know, like this guy's in milliliters, this guy's announces this is, you know, like, you know, that's a huge task. And it sounds like that's what you guys are really digging into. It's like trying to get all that stuff figured out, which seems like a hard challenge,
Carolyn Ward:honestly. It is. Clinical data is extremely messy, you know, obviously we've got some structured, some semi structured, and then the full unstructured free text, like free flow of thought note. That seems to be where everything is. And yes, that is actually where I would say the vast bulk of the clinical richness is. And it's one of the reasons why, as a physician, Um, we can skim through, you know, your vitals really quickly, your blood work, but I want to see, hey, that specialist I sent you to, what was their actual recommendation? And you can glean a lot of things from their actual free text note of like, generally how they quote, quote felt about this person. Right. And it's really about using data to take these feelings. Like, I feel like this person is going to have a complication, right? Like right now we, we think a lot about like, why it's important for physicians to be at bedside. And it's to make that in person evaluation. That's That feels like God, it's really based on experience, but there's so many times where, you know, you're in attending a resident is presenting to you like, Oh, Mrs. So and so is a 54 year old woman. She's this, this, and this, I think this is going on. You then go into the bedside to go see this person. You're like, she's really sick. Something is about to happen to her. And I did not get that impression from what you just told me. And I didn't get that impression until I saw her. And I think that that is like, how can we use data to pull these, like these feelings into like actual real quantitative. things that can be scaled, right? Um, especially if we don't think that we're going to be able to bring a physician bedside to every patient in the United States, right? If that's not possible, we need technology and data to be able to bridge us there or, um, a bunch of us are not going to have healthcare in the future.
Chris Brandt:I would love to see a world where we're, we're doing more proactive analytics. And proactive health care, you know, and that's being coordinated by somebody who understand can can put all that data together to, you know, like, understand the outcomes. And I know, you know, we were talking before you, you, you see the, the, the role of the primary care physician to be a very different thing in the future. Could you speak to, like, what you see in the future of health care?
Carolyn Ward:Yeah, I have a feeling that, you know, as primary care providers, if we expect to stay in the role of. understanding the full patient picture and pulling into these different pieces, uh, to provide some general understanding and direction of where this patient is going. I think physicians are going to need to look a lot more like data scientists. Um, I think that that, that ability to do data analytics, understand data models, risk models, predictive models, when to apply them, assess them, how good are they, how to use them. I think that that should be part of medical training and it likely will be in the future. Um, and what I think we'll see a lot. of being pushed in the population health space right now, um, we're going to be able to do a lot of that at a very individual specific level. And, uh, the primary care physician is going to be responsible for that. So if you don't understand how to apply certain models, how they're built, you know, we're going to need some of these physicians to straight up help build the models. We're going to need a vast many more of them to be able to understand how to use them, right? How do you actually use this to dictate some kind of care? Um, and I would love to see that being incorporated into medical training as soon as possible.
Chris Brandt:Yeah, that's gonna be really tough because I mean, you know, being a data analyst at that level is, is a hard thing. It's not, there's not a lot of. people out there who can do that. And I imagine, you know, sitting behind that's going to be a lot of artificial intelligence to help some of that kind of come together. But, you know, people are scared of data driven care, you know, irrationally or, or otherwise, right? You know, it's like the data says what it says and, you know, like whether you like it or not doesn't change the data. But, you know, like I think people are, you know, you're going to have to find somebody who can both deeply analyze the data. And be compassionate enough to deliver the, the, the, you know, results of that data and, and help them understand it and absorb it. Right. You know, that's a. That's going to be a tricky job, they, those, they're going to have to get paid really well, I think. Hopefully. And it's like, and we're in a world where, you know, like, they're under attack constantly, all healthcares.
Carolyn Ward:I mean, I agree. I think a huge part of it is because the expectation from consumers, from patients, is going up, up, up. Because in every other aspect of our lives as consumers, technology has vastly improved and Made much more convenient all aspects of our life, right? Like I don't want to leave my house to get groceries great Amazon Fresh, right? I don't want to leave my house to go, you know, buy this that and the other great every single company It has some kind of delivery service now and I can get things next day, right? And so I think Then they go to healthcare and they're like, stay on the phone for 30 minutes. Hopefully you get an appointment at three months. Like, and it's just, it's so different from the rest of our lives that there's just such a push to bring healthcare. into the right century, right? From technology standpoint. And, and the truth is that physicians want to be able to deliver those better outcomes to people go into medicine because they want to help people. You know, I think the vast majority of doctors that you talk to you ask them, why did you go into healthcare? They will probably tell you two things. Number one, it's intellectually stimulating. And number two, I did it to have impact on people's lives. Yeah. There's a ton of intellectually stimulating things you can do that outside of medicine, right?
Chris Brandt:That don't involve as many gross things.
Carolyn Ward:Also true. Medicine is just, it's a really unique and interesting and challenging field. Um, but I think a lot of physicians don't feel that their work today is really in line with why they came into medicine, right? It's either totally rote. You're just following algorithms, clicking buttons on the computer. So it's not intellectually challenging and, or two. You're like barely spending any of your time actually talking to people. Yeah and patients So if you take those two things away, it's like, okay, then why are we doing this?
Chris Brandt:Yeah, why am I here? well, and then there's generational challenges too because I mean you have older doctors who like what's a computer, you know, and young guy young doctors who are you know, like let's Let's dig in, you know? Yeah. It's, it's, it's a wide range and it's going to take a while to, to figure all this out. But, um, certainly what you guys are doing at Particle Health sounds really, really, really interesting. I, I think that's, I think you're onto something there. Um, so what, what's next for the future of, of Particle Health?
Carolyn Ward:Yeah, so we are, um, going to be launching a bunch of really interesting new products, uh, in 2024. But I would say the general theme is essentially, um, Now that we are able to really get this comprehensive picture of a patient, what are the insights we can generate that are really unique to only having a comprehensive picture? Meaning there's tons of insights you can generate from small pieces of the pie, but what are the things that you can only generate when you see the whole pie? That's kind of how I think about it. And I think a lot of it has to do again with what are the trends that change over time for this patient that are important, right? So, um, again, I really go back to thinking about. how a patient actually moves in their care journey, um, between providers, between facilities. And, uh, even that mapping in and of itself is really unique and interesting. Um, so I'm excited. I think the future is bright.
Chris Brandt:Yeah, no doubt. No doubt. And, uh, it's, it's exciting stuff. And I, I hope, uh, I hope, hope you can really get this out there so that, you know, a lot of people can, you know, experience these better outcomes. Now, if, if, if Are you solely focused on large healthcare systems? Are you down to like the individual provider level, you know, and, and if, and in all that, how would people, you know, reach out to you and, and take advantage of what you guys are doing?
Carolyn Ward:Yeah, absolutely. So we primarily today work with digital health companies that includes value based provider organizations. Um, it includes both primary care and specialty care at digital health, uh, companies. We also work with, um, Some EHRs and analytic companies, so some precision medicine, uh, companies or companies who basically sell into provider organizations, but are primarily driven by, uh, AI algorithms. What I would say is, uh, we would, we are looking to sell into like large traditional health systems. Um, it's hard to get them to move, right? They, uh, usually, unfortunately, Over the last decade have acquired a bunch of point solutions that don't really work together, and some of them just straight up don't work. So, um, it's really about proving that we can replace a bunch of those point solutions and actually do what we say we can do. Um, so I am absolutely very interested in that as well. And for anybody out there who's interested in learning more, hearing more, wants to connect with me, I'm absolutely happy to, uh, connect with you on LinkedIn. DM me. Um, but you could also go to particlehealth. com and see a little bit of what we're up to.
Chris Brandt:Caroline, thanks for all this. I, I'm, I'm super excited about, you know, what you guys are doing because I think it's so important to improve what we've got right now. Um, and as I get older and I get, you know, to use more of the health care system, you know, I'm really, I'm really excited about solutions like this as everything gets more complex. So thank you very much for being on. Thanks for doing what you do. And I'm so excited to see where you guys go from here.
Carolyn Ward:Thank you. This has been fun.
Chris Brandt:Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for watching. I'd love to hear from you in the comments. And if you could please like us and subscribe. And leave a comment. That'd be great, too. See you next time.