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Saul Marquez:
Hey, everybody! It’s Saul Marquez, and I want to welcome you back to the Outcomes Rocket. Super excited that you joined us today. We’ve got an extraordinary guest, his name is Adam Pellegrini. He’s the CEO and co-founder of Jasper Health, and in this role, Adam grows Jasper into the leading platform enabling cancer patient navigation, management, and care. Previous to Jasper, Adam was the senior vice president of Virtual Care and Consumer Health Innovations for CVS and Caremark, leading new product ideation and execution across the portfolio. And before CVS, Adam was the senior vice president and general manager at Fitbit Health Solutions, which was tasked with helping Fitbit connect its products’ information data. He’s he knows the space well, and with over 20 years of experience, I’m super excited to have him on the podcast today to talk about what healthcare is looking, but also what Jasper Health is up to. So excited that you’re here with us, Adam; thanks for joining.
Adam Pellegrini:
Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.
Saul Marquez:
Absolutely. Absolutely. Look, before we dive into Jasper, get to know you better, so talk to us about what inspires your work in healthcare.
Adam Pellegrini:
Absolutely. So I’ve been doing digital health now, I think you can call it digital health, for about 23 years. So because this podcast has video, you can tell I’ve got the marks to prove it. Before digital health, actually, I was very clinical. I’m not a doctor, but I was an ER tech, an OR tech, I was a medic in the Army, all of those things. And I always thought to myself, really, when you’re a medic, or you’re in aviation medicine, that’s where was in, you’re helping people one-on-one, and it’s super powerful. I love direct patient care, but when digital health came around, and opportunities in digital health around 2000, for me, I thought to myself, wow, this idea of the Internet, and back then, remember, it was pretty new, the Internet stuff. This idea that the Internet could help, one person can help millions was super powerful to me. So my first role was working at the American Cancer Society building Cancer.org, which in 2000, 2001, ’02, ’03, ’04, still Internet being new, was one of the biggest healthcare websites in the world. So I learned a lot about what cancer patients and caregivers needed. I went on from there, there was a product, again, I’m aging myself, but I led Healthvault as a product manager for Microsoft Healthvault in around the 2006 timeframe, and then H1N1, which was the COVID of the early 2000s, the concern, that came around in me and someone that also worked at Microsoft, a cardiothoracic surgeon named Dr. Jim Malt, created a company called Health Circles, which really started building out these concepts of care management, care coordination like circa 2000, before it really became something in the industry; and then he sold that to Qualcomm, Walgreens and then Fitbit, and then CVS. So just, I have an eclectic path to where I am, and I would love to say I planned all of it, and I could say I planned none of it. So just ended up where I ended up, and Jasper was really calling, harkening back to that American Cancer Society experience.
Saul Marquez:
Adam, thank you for that. A super fascinating background, and the work that you’ve done is just impressive, right? And how you’ve built your career is also very impressive as well. So I appreciate you sharing that journey with us. What would you say your North Star has been, though? What’s been that thing that’s motivated you?
Adam Pellegrini:
I’ve thought about that. Especially as you get older, you start thinking about those things more, I think. And the North Star really has been, I got into healthcare a long, long, what, I think was a medical explorer, which is like a scouts for healthcare when I was 14, 15, 16 years old. And I remember … out in an ambulance on a racetrack, and I just had this passion for helping patients. I was like, this is what I want to do. And I think my North Star hasn’t changed from that very early experience. I still, to this day, I’m a volunteer firefighter.
Saul Marquez:
Are you really? Cool.
Adam Pellegrini:
In a small gold mining town in the mountains of Idaho, you get to help people and still do direct patient care. But that’s still my North Star, is really, can I do something to help somebody? And if I could just help one person or two people or three people make their life a little bit better, that’s still the North Star for my sort of my passion.
Saul Marquez:
I love that. That’s so great. Thanks for sharing that, and I could feel that, man, just talking to you. You’re the real deal, and I love that leaders like you are at the helm of companies like Jasper. So talk to us about Jasper Health. What is it that you guys are doing to add value to the healthcare ecosystem?
Adam Pellegrini:
Yeah, Jasper Health, so it was incubated out of Redesign, which is a venture studio in New York. And really, I’m a co-founder, But really, the true idea came from one of Kira Wampler, who’s still at Redesign, and she had a loved one had a serious diagnosis, and she was, at the time, just come from working as the CMO of Lyft, and she thought, we have all these apps out there that streamline and automate things that are very complex, but why don’t we have something similar and experience that really automates and reduces stress and anxiety and the pain of the healthcare system for those who really need it the most, those who are diagnosed with cancer and the caregivers? That was the true nucleus of the idea of Jasper. I came over from CVS and specifically said the really big opportunity here is we have this really compelling digital experience like a planner for patients, but imagine connecting that to the broader healthcare ecosystem, to care teams, to care management teams at health plans, to oncologists at major health centers, and really unlocking what I’ve been chasing, again, for 23 years, is this idea that we’ve created a digital experience that’s value to the patient, that they want to stay engaged with. Digital health, the path of digital health for the last 20 years is littered by organizations that build highly complex clinical digital systems and literally think about patient engagement and patient experience as an afterthought, and they launch these huge monolithic platforms, and no one uses them. Now, don’t cast any aspersions on others for doing that because I’ve done it 3 or 4 times where I’ve built these, I’m like, wow, look at this triage dashboard, radial risk stratification, and oh, we’re going to do this over here, and you build it, and they don’t come. And so, in cancer, it’s a totally different need. If you build something that’s practical and useful, they’re searching for it, they truly need it, and they use it. So we built Jasper to be, first of all, patient first. We, before we wrote a single line of code, we did 2000 interviews with patients and caregivers to see what they needed. What they needed is very simple. Whenever someone is diagnosed with a serious disease, either a caregiver or themselves, they create these big binders. All their medical records, labs, all that kind of stuff goes in there, and that’s how they keep track of everything. And when a patient said to us is, I just want all of that big binder in a digital experience, make it easy for me to track my scheduled appointments, to learn about my diagnosis, but more importantly, be there for me on that, sort of, when I need an ear, when I need to talk to someone. So Jasper is not focused on the clinical side necessarily, it’s focused on the psychosocial support aspect of cancer. So mental health, diet and nutrition, medication adherence, paying for medication, those are the type of things that we built out on the platform that coaching and lifestyle support. And we learned a lot about this at Fitbit, right? What do people, stress, anxiety, how do we reduce stress, reduce anxiety? How do we actually have use biometric signals to come in and provide coaching? So it’s a lot of that, but supporting the cancer patient or the cancer caregiver and the patient together.
Saul Marquez:
Thank you for that, Adam. Yeah, it’s very much patient-centered, and I love the tagline here on the front of your website: On a good day, dealing with cancer is complicated; on a bad day, it could feel impossible. Man, that’s so well said, and the digital tools you guys are providing is making it bearable. Many people get lost, and it does become a big challenge. So talk to us about how you’re different and who you work with. Are you working with payers, or are you direct-to-consumer? Talk to us about that.
Adam Pellegrini:
Yeah, so thank you for asking. Yeah, we, I feel like we’re very different because there are now a lot of organizations, and it’s all good stuff. A digital oncology company starting up doing different things. Again, from the American Cancer Society, my mantra was literally, the more the merrier, right? I mean, there isn’t, I really don’t see a lot of competitors because if 3 or 4 companies that do things similar to us are really doing a good job for cancer patients, great, work myself out of a job, I would love that. This is one area where everyone together needs to lean in and collaborate, but how we are different is, one, we don’t try to do what the oncologist is doing. We’re that psychosocial piece. The things that the oncologists really want to be able to do, they just have zero time to do it. As a matter of fact, some oncologists refer to us as like the co-pilots that help them do the things they wish they could do between appointments.
Saul Marquez:
That’s awesome.
Adam Pellegrini:
For many oncologists, they’re literally doing appointments back-to-back diagnosis, right? And they’re like, see? You ask them who’s talking to the patient about what to eat during chemotherapy; who’s talking to the patient about, hey, I just prescribed this drug, can you even afford the co-pay? They don’t have time to ask that, right? So we’re now co-pilots with them on that journey to actually be there as an augmented capability. Who we actually work with? Health plans are primarily who we work with right now, so we are partnered with Optum and United, partnered with Cigna and Evernorth, with their Accredo team, and we just launched a major relationship partnership fully live and active right now with Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York. Most of these are focused on delivering cancer support and navigation services to employers for their employees. MSK has over 6.5 million employees that they cover alone, not their own employees, but their partners, their employer partners out there, and so we are now the platform for all of that. So you’re really seeing now, like with MSK, this best-in-class cancer center that really extends their reach using digital, so they adopted Jasper; now they have their own version of Jasper, and now they can go across the country and deliver their services virtually. So that’s the same kind of model with Optum and United and Cigna and a couple other large organizations as well.
Saul Marquez:
That’s really cool and a huge differentiator, I would imagine, for Memorial Sloan Kettering. And also, I’m thinking about the physicians, right? Talk about physician retention.
Adam Pellegrini:
Yeah, if we can make the physician’s life easier because we’re taking a little bit off the plate, that is a retention strategy. It also, we’re not second-guessing oncologists, right? That’s one thing that we’re very careful about, right? You have truly the smartest oncologists in the world at Memorial Sloan Kettering. What we want to be is, when I was in the Army, I was a surgeon, I was a surgical tech, so I was a surgeon’s assistant. And so my job was like to make that surgeon’s job a little bit easier by making sure I knew the procedure and handling the right instruments and all that kind of stuff. So really, that’s what we’ve been focusing on, is how do we make the oncologists’ life a little bit better? They’re, taking off their stuff off their plate. That’s really been the focus for us.
Saul Marquez:
I love that, and that’s a game-changer. So for all you employers listening, providers, looking to, yeah, this is a podcast that, you should take action on, and on all our podcasts, we say this all the time. Adam, we say, did this resonate with you? Don’t let the idea die. Hit pause on the podcast. Take a look in the show notes because in the show notes you’re going to have ways to get in touch with Adam and his team to do something about it, because that’s why we do this, right? To, the speed at which you could take an idea to market, that’s going to determine your success, and so take advantage of it now. So as, Adam, you guys are doing such incredible things for today’s patients, physicians, and then organizations doing their best to tackle such a big problem. Talk to us a little bit about maybe some of the challenges that you’ve had in building the platform and what you’ve learned from them, because we, I feel like we can learn more from that.
Adam Pellegrini:
And one of the challenges is really educating the market, right? So this is a sort of a new service for employers. So employers often are like, doesn’t my health plan already do this, or doesn’t someone else already do this? So really educating on how this is a little bit different and focusing on that psychosocial support. So that’s one challenge we had to get over was educating the market. Now we feel like we’ve gotten past that because it almost now is table stakes for employers to offer this type of service. Building the platform and those capabilities is constantly a challenge, not because we don’t know how to build it or the mechanics around building it, but constantly making sure that the consumer or patient experience is constantly engaging. For example, we want to keep folks on, as much as possible, to keep providing help for them. So we’re thinking ourselves, what do patients need on a regular basis? And one thing we found was they want to talk to other patients or survivors just like them with the same diagnosis and the same profile so that they can share experiences but, more importantly, learn from each other. So we created a social network that connects newly diagnosed patients to survivors, and then they can actually sit there and hand down the knowledge that they’ve received over asking all these questions and then really focus that new diagnosed patient on educating and then saying, what are the ten questions I should ask? And those who are living with cancer or a survivor are going to go, hey, if it were me week one, these are the following questions I wish I would have asked. It took me months and months to figure this out. So those kind of, a social network with purpose that is matched up with, like said, like the folks that really want to talk to each other. That was an answer to how do we keep it engaging and useful to the patients. And we also are starting to look at other things like a hope index. A lot of people don’t realize how powerful hope it is in these type of journeys. Sometimes our members just call a coach because they need an ear. We have one member, he was skipping all of his medications and it showed a red alert, skipping medication, red alert. Our coach reached out and said, we noticed that you’re skipping your medications. What’s going on? Can you not afford it? Do you need help? And he said, I was just diagnosed. I was given a death sentence. So why should I take these medications and pay for these medications? So as the coach just started talking to that patient, she’s one of the things she said is, did you even, did you look at clinical trials? And the patient said, what’s a clinical trial? So literally, we expect patients that are newly diagnosed to know so much, but the reality is this is new to them, net new. They never thought about their entire life. They may not know what a clinical trial is. So we got that member, from what is a clinical trial all the way through looking for clinical trials, matching to a clinical trial, started taking medication again, called back in two weeks with our coach, and said, I now have hope. I don’t know if I’m going to get into this trial, gives me hope, so I’m going to start taking these meds again. Those intangibles, I think we constantly miss. And if we can actually use a hope index and try to track where is someone on the hope curve, and what can we do intervention-wise to ratchet up that hope? We could probably see a lot of health outcomes increase simply by giving them the inspiration and the hope to continue their treatment and continue staying adherent and just staying as positive as possible.
Saul Marquez:
Wow, I think it’s so powerful, Adam, what you guys are doing. This community thing, a survivor community, like you’re just showing people that it’s possible, and then this hope index, that is so cool. Like this idea that something intangible like hope can be tangible and measured, it’s an indicator of if you’re going to make it or not.
Adam Pellegrini:
Yeah, and truly, we know that other factors like physical activity and sleep and all of these psychosocial and lifestyle metrics together can actually have a really positive impact on how your treatment goes. As a matter of fact, we did it. When I was at Fitbit, there was a whole story in Wired magazine about how Fitbits were truly loved by oncology researchers because they were using them to look at things like remission reduction, better chemotherapy treatment. So that really got me onto this pathway of how do we look at all the intangibles or the things that we may have missed to try to holistically look around the patient and say, can we enhance or can we improve their outcomes through things that we may be missing?
Saul Marquez:
Man, hey, look, I wanted to share with you. Adam, I was, I did this event, I went to a Tony Robbins event, this was years ago, and he mentioned something that I thought was really cool. He said, fear is the imagination undirected, but hope is the imagination directed.
Adam Pellegrini:
I like that.
Saul Marquez:
And you guys are directing the imagination of these people that need it so much through these psychosocial metrics, through this community that you’re forming. This is powerful stuff that you’re doing.
Adam Pellegrini:
Yeah, and luckily we have so many patients that give us feedback of what they’re missing that we constantly listen, that’s total voice of the patient-driven, and we have patients on our advisory board that are actually working on our roadmap with us. I think that’s one thing I always think about with digital health these days is, first of all, you should always have those that are impacted, helping you build the product from a product perspective. I also always believe, and it’s not true in every case, but having leaders that actually have been in healthcare before, not just digital health, I think is important, right? I always say to myself in the Army, an iPhone back then probably would have been great for a sucking chest wound, and that’s about it. So having folks that have actually done patient care and thinking about the true knot, the nitty gritty part of it and how do you improve that experience, I think that helps a long way, and it keeps you humble, right? You have to remember there are people delivering care right now in some of the most toughest situations; your job should be to make their lives easier as well.
Saul Marquez:
Wow, man, I love this. Adam, I love the work that you guys are doing. Folks, as we mentioned, there’s an opportunity for you to engage here. The website is HelloJasper.com, we’re going to leave that in the show notes below. But look, Adam, as we conclude our conversation here, by the way, I’d love to do a part two to this because this is fascinating work that you’re up to. What call to action would you leave folks with, and what’s the best way that they could get in touch with you and the team over there to give you guys a try?
Adam Pellegrini:
Yeah, I always say, first of all, we do offer the digital planner for free. That’s a free service to anyone in the country. So if you know someone that’s newly diagnosed or having a tough time, send them to HelloJasper.com. They can sign up for free. You don’t have to have your employer or your health plan. It works best with your employer or health plan, but the digital planner itself, we decided to keep it free simply because people were using it, and sometimes that’s all they had. Definitely share the word if you’re, if someone’s struggling, send them over to HelloJasper.com. And if they, if you’re an employer benefit person or a payer, you want to learn more, definitely ping me. I’m happy to provide more information. I think any employer that has United now has access to Jasper, or Cigna has access to Jasper, or Memorial Sloan Kettering direct, MSK direct, they now have a Jasper version. You may already have access to it, just give us a holler.
Saul Marquez:
Wow, hey, part of the, part of it is being aware, and I’m hopeful that this talk with you today, Adam, created awareness for the great work that you’re doing. You guys probably already have access to this, so why don’t you dig into your existing plan, ask your benefits provider if you have it, but, and if you don’t, then reach out to Adam and his team and it’s a great opportunity. So Adam can’t thank you enough for being with us today and for sharing the awesome work that you guys are doing at Jasper.
Adam Pellegrini:
Thank you so much. I really appreciate the opportunity to share with your audience as well.
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