HLTH_Maulik Majmudar: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Saul Marquez:
Hey everybody! Saul Marquez with the HLTH Matters podcast. I want to welcome you back to today’s episode straight from the show floor of the HLTH event in Las Vegas, Nevada. I’m joined by the amazing Dr. Maulik Majmudar. He is the co-founder and Chief Medical Officer at Biofourmis. Dr. Majmudar served as Medical Officer at Amazon, where he led several healthcare-related initiatives. Before Amazon, Dr. Majmudar was Associate Director of the Healthcare Transformation Lab at Massachusetts General Hospital and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, where he was responsible for the identification, validation, and implementation of digital health solutions to improve care delivery. He’s doing some great work at the company, Bioforumis, today, and I’m excited to dig into that with him. So, Dr. Majmudar, I want to welcome you to the podcast. Thank you so much for being with me here today.
Maulik Majmudar:
Well, thank you for having me.
Saul Marquez:
It’s such a pleasure. We’ve been talking a lot about health equity, hospital-in-the-home, helping providers get beyond the issues with labor, you know, the labor shortages, and I’m excited to dive into some of the things that you guys are up to, Maulik, at Biofourmis. Before we do, though, I’d love to find out more about you. What is it that inspires your work in healthcare?
Maulik Majmudar:
Great, well, thank you for the question. You know, I actually grew up, most don’t know this, actually grew up in India and moved to the US in high school, and I’m the first physician in my family. So a lot of my experiences in healthcare really revolve around some of the things I observed growing up in a different country and comparing and contrasting that with healthcare in the US. But what’s similar across all, the both continents, is this fact that healthcare is still relatively inaccessible, unaffordable, and in some ways unacceptable for a lot of people across both countries. At least that’s the definition of healthcare, by WHO is, has to be acceptable, affordable, and equitable, right? So I think, as I see it in the US, going through med school residency and clinical training, there’s a very high degree of variation in care across different geographies. One of those common statistics people use is that, the lifespan of a person living in downtown Massachusetts or downtown Boston could be 12 to 15 years different than somebody growing up in rural Mississippi. And why is that? So how can technology really play a role in driving a lot of the equitable, and access to care? So that’s really what inspires me, is trying to say location should not be the reason you have such a drastic difference in healthcare outcomes.
Saul Marquez:
I love that, that’s so great. And you know, we’ve been getting a lot of experiences like these global perspectives, Maulik, and sort of your youth in India, you gained a lot of insights and now you’re here, and I love how you just did the contrast to the, to what the WHO put out there. I’m like, oh, that was good. Hey, I’m going to have to use that, so thank you. And so as you think about Biofourmis, you know, what is Biofourmis doing and how are you guys adding value to the healthcare ecosystem?
Maulik Majmudar:
For Biofourmis, the fundamental thesis for us is, as you’ve observed prior, during the pandemic, when it started before the pandemic, there’s this huge movement to transitioning care out of the brick-and-mortar clinics and hospitals to the home environment. There’s a number of factors driving this macro change, that’s financial pressures, there’s capacity constraints, there’s obviously regulatory changes in the landscape, there’s also financial model, payment model changes with the government, but as we see this movement from brick-and-mortar to the home, one of the fundamental challenges today is they don’t have the tools, the technologies, and the teams to actually support the transition of care. So what Biofourmis is doing is building the platform to enable these health systems and provider groups to actually stand up programs that can scale in the home, right? So for us, we do that across a full care continuum. So we do that across acute care in the home to the hospital-at-home, we do across post-discharge transitions for care programs, and we also do that for our longitudinal chronic disease management. And for us, the important thing there is that, historically those things have been in silos, so if you’re a health system, you have to sign 10, 20 different contracts with vendors to support each of these verticals across multiple diseases, so how do you build the real, exactly, that’s the point, solutions, right? So how do you build a platform that is disease agnostic, site of care agnostic, and acuity agnostic? And that’s fundamentally what we’ve built. And the second thing that Biofourmis has done in the last few months is go from a technology company to really a care delivery company by building our own provider organization. So more recently, we have actually hired our own clinical staff of nurses, physicians, and health navigators to actually support people in the management of care as opposed to simply monitoring data in the home.
Saul Marquez:
Sure, yeah, and half the battle is really the people, right? Sure, you’ve got the technology, but do you have the people to support the new care delivery model?
Maulik Majmudar:
That’s right, I think the issue is, you know, if you look at the world of what used to be called remote physiological monitoring, or RPM, we use the term RPM a little differently at Biofourmis, we call it remote patient management. And the subtle, but important difference there is, historically, it was all about let’s put some devices in the home, let’s collect a bunch of data, that data goes to a bunch of doctors, but they may or may not be ready to receive the data, they may not want to see that data, that data may not be clinically actionable, and that’s where the conundrum, the challenges lie. For us, we’re saying let’s have our care team handle the data, interpret that data, act on the data, and actually manage the patients and communicate that to the primary team to reduce the burden on them, and that’s really critical difference.
Saul Marquez:
Totally, yeah, you know, we’ve been covering a lot of discussions around businesses themselves in this environment. You know, it’s a difficult environment for founders, you know, gone from a very frothy kind of high valuation to now gut punches. But at the end of the day, it’s the platform businesses that are the strongest and survive. Talk to us about what you believe is going to help you guys weather the storm, and I would say, even most importantly is, help your customers weather the storm.
Maulik Majmudar:
Yeah, that’s a great question. You know, there was a really interesting session yesterday. I forget the exact title, it was like, Unicorns aren’t real. We’re talking about the business of healthcare, and I think people consider this consumerization of healthcare is an analogy to software and the KPIs that we’re using to measure success and growth were all based on traditional consumer metrics like growth and users and adoption, which is fine, but in healthcare, the ultimate measure of success is actually outcomes and secondarily, unit economics. I think in this market dynamics will have to get back to the fundamentals, is this actually driving better patient outcomes, whether it be tech or services, that it doesn’t matter, it’s actually the outcomes achieved, and then back into other economics there from a sustainable, scalable business or not. It’s unlike consumer retail organizations like Amazons of the world, it’s just not the same in healthcare, right? The outcomes is what drives the cost reduction, not just the volume of growth. So I think that’s, I think we’re going to right-size the KPIs used to measure success and growth. For Biofourmis specifically, I think we’re fortunate enough that we have two major business verticals, we’ve been talking about care delivery, part of our business. We also have our digital medicine business, which is focused on building digital tools and assets to drive better patient outcomes but target at pharma companies. How do you develop new digital tools to guide patient monitoring, predicting adverse events, clinical trials, so we have some diversification of revenue that allows us to sort of grow and scale in this tough market?
Saul Marquez:
That’s fantastic. Yeah, you know, Maulik, I think that’s great. You guys are thinking ahead, you know, putting together a business model that helps the different stakeholders in the ecosystem, right? Not just the payers, providers, but also now life sciences, so that’s really exciting to hear. And these life science companies, they need the data, you know, I mean, patient-reported data, I don’t know if it’s cutting it, you know, and so having something more reliable like the platform you guys offer could be very beneficial.
Maulik Majmudar:
Yeah, one of the focus, you know, it’s interesting you mention that because I think there is this world of patient-generated health data that we’ll talk about, and then there’s the clinical data that we’re used to in the world of healthcare delivery or pharma. I think for us, the secret sauce of Biofourmis is always, how do we discover and validate new endpoints or digital biomarkers that fundamentally help you redefine how that disease processes to measure, monitor, or actually test it. And I think that’s been highly valuable to pharma, to rethink through technology, how do you actually come up with new endpoints that either accelerate clinical trials, that accelerate the endpoint selection or the targeting of the patients so that your sample size required for trials is much smaller than the, historically? So I think that’s been valuable.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah, that’s huge. So as you think about this concept of health equity, it’s been a big theme at our conference and there’s been a lot of focus on it. How is your company and the work that you guys do helping with the problem of health equity?
Maulik Majmudar:
It’s a great, great question. I think probably in every industry within healthcare, especially the issue of healthcare disparities and racial inequalities is very well studied and the pandemic really brought that to the life for the first time, this idea that patients with obesity, blood pressure, diabetes had much poorer outcomes compared to their counterparts, and those diseases are highly prevalent in socioeconomically deprived neighborhoods and underserved populations. The reality is that those populations usually also have poor access to care, and the quality care that they receive is actually highly variable. So one of the things we’ve, again, our approach to this has always been how do you drive standardization, right? We don’t want your local community provider group or your local care model to dictate the kind of care you receive, especially when the evidence is really strong on what the right thing to do is. So for us taking software as the starting point to say, can we actually codify these evidence-based guidelines into software? And that those things drive recommendations for different diseases to drugs and doses of these medications allow you to then prescribe to that evidence-based medicine is one way to address the inequalities and challenges of equity and gap in healthcare. The second is access, right? When you have patients who are driving in 30, 40 miles and they have two jobs and they can’t take time off of work and the clinics are only open 9 to 5, these are all challenges people face on a day-to-day basis and they can’t take time off of work, they can’t, or they have daycare issues because they don’t have childcare. There’s all these practical things that come in the way of going to clinic visit. Having the ability to do a 24/7 virtual visit, or asynchronous visit, even through text messaging, just gives them more flexibility and options to receive care that they otherwise would receive. So I think some combination of virtual care delivery and standardization of evidence-based therapies to us is, at least, one approach to try and solve the problem.
Saul Marquez:
Love it, and the platform that you guys have helps with that.
Maulik Majmudar:
Absolutely, the Biofourmis virtual care platform enables us to do both of these things.
Saul Marquez:
That’s fantastic. So folks, you’re thinking about how you could reach these patients that are hard to reach. You know, we are getting more sophisticated in identifying these social determinants of health. Now there’s platforms like Biofourmis that could help you reach these patients in a way that’s consistent, that’s equitable, and it’s fair, and acceptable, right? That was, the three, one of the three.
Maulik Majmudar:
I think I’ll have to repeat it, but WHO is, I think the four A’s and always forget the fourth one, so I was pausing earlier, but it’s acceptable, affordable, accessible, are the three that I.
Saul Marquez:
Acceptable, affordable, accessible, yeah, and those are the three things that we want for everyone, so let’s keep those in focus. So really, you know, I appreciate the insights that you’ve shared today. Any closing thoughts?
Maulik Majmudar:
I think the only closing thought I would have is, you know, I don’t know, there are hundreds of companies at HLTH this year and every year trying to do the good work. We’re trying to improve our healthcare system, healthcare delivery for our patients and communities. There’s a lot of work for everybody to do and enough to go around, it’s a big industry, of course, but I think the thing that will make everybody succeed is if we all align as a community around the end goal, around patient outcomes, and if all of us agree in aligning the right metrics of success and march towards it, I think we can get the policy changes, the payment models, all those aligned to it. I think everybody will succeed, right, now, there’s a lot of challenges in operating fee-for-service models and operating risk-sharing models of value-based care models, and there’s a lot of confusion around which model of care is really where the success of the companies rely on, but I feel like once we align on that, it’ll really help.
Saul Marquez:
Love it. Well, hey, I appreciate your thought leadership here and the work that you guys are doing at Biofourmis. Really, thank you for spending time with us today. What’s the best place that people could get in touch with you or learn more about the company?
Maulik Majmudar:
Yeah, please, our website, of course, is the place to start. You know, www.Biofourmis.com. Of course, there’s, all of our senior leadership is available on LinkedIn, so, of course, you can get ahold of us there, and then you can always feel free to contact me directly there as well. But we’d love to hear from our either customers, patients, fans, anybody, so thank you for having me.
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