Information to Action: The Intersection Between Data Collection and Healthcare with Manav Sevak, Co-Founder & CEO at Memora Health: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix
Information to Action: The Intersection Between Data Collection and Healthcare with Manav Sevak, Co-Founder & CEO at Memora Health: 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, welcome back to the Outcomes Rocket, this is Saul Marquez, and we are at the ViVE event and it’s such a pleasure to be joined with Manav Sevak. He is the CEO and founder of Memora Health, a healthcare technology company digitizing and automating complex care workflows for healthcare organizations. Manav’s focus in Digital Health stems from his background in medicine and training as a computational biologist. Previously, he’s worked as a public health researcher at the US Centers for Disease Control and Harvard School of Public Health, and most recently as a computational biologist focused on cancer genomics research at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. I am so privileged to have him here with us today. Manav, such a pleasure to have you here!
Manav Sevak:
Excited to be here! Thanks, Saul!
Saul Marquez:
Absolutely! So obviously, we’re here at the event, you just got off the stage, stellar presentation. If you could just kind of give us the high level what you shared with the group. It’d be great for the listeners who maybe weren’t there to to kind of get the bullet points from that.
Manav Sevak:
Yeah, absolutely. We had a great kind of mixed group of a couple of digital health companies, a couple of companies that spend a lot of time in the SDO space and a couple of health systems who broadly had a discussion around health equity and how, one, there’s lots and lots of noise around health equity right now and different types of initiatives that are really coming to the forefront and the spotlight. Second, how digital tools like Memora and Unite US, and several others can play a really important role in bridging the digital divide and actually helping to make the way that care is accessed and delivered much more equitable. So talked a lot about solutions around different outcomes that actually matter quite a bit, and it was a great discussion.
Saul Marquez:
That’s fantastic. And a big, big focus of, of this meeting, and I think really themes in healthcare are that equity, being able to bring forth access. And so, if you had to summarize maybe one thing that you’ve loved about the event so far, what would you say it is?
Manav Sevak:
Yeah, the top thing that I’ve loved about the event so far is just the energy. Having people in person once again, having people have productive conversations such as the ones that our team has had. But everyone, even across the panels and the presentations and everything, in person, where people are excited not just about getting together, but actually around a lot of the work that’s happening in the healthcare industry is something that I think everybody has missed a lot of over the course of the pandemic. And it’s one great for us to see the energy, but hopefully other people are also getting a lot out of it.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah, I feel it too, and I couldn’t agree with you more. It is, it is definitely an energized space. And so, you know, we’re learning here, there’s a ton of really great stuff that your company is doing. So I want to, I want to refocus on some of those things. What would you say, Manav, is the number one theme health systems, payers, providers should be focused on in 2022?
Manav Sevak:
Sure. So there’s lots of themes, several that have been identified over the course of the past couple of days here at, at the event. The two big ones that really stand out for us from all the discussions that we have with health system leaders across the board. And keep in mind, this is from the perspective of academic health systems, from community health systems, from federally qualified health centers, and in a lot of cases, even from, from groups like health plans are two big trends. The first is the shift of care into settings like the home, and care outside very traditional clinical settings is one that I think uniformly everybody has paid a lot of attention to and is spending a lot of time thinking about, especially in 2022, as people think a little bit around how care transitioned and changed over the course of the pandemic, one. Second, how lots of different reimbursement models, how lots of different efforts around consumerization are shifting care outside of traditional settings. I think that that’s one that everyone is extremely cognizant of right now. The second is one that we’ve particularly seen come up quite a bit over the course of the past 6 to 8 months, which is how do you make sure that we are actually giving our caregivers and our clinicians tools that are making them not just more efficient, but actually enabling them to deliver care? The concept of burnout is something that we’ve heard a lot of over the course of the past two years, making sure that we’re actually not just giving them tools that are burdensome, even if they may be valuable, but actually are making them much better around how they can deliver care and actually meet their patients where they are is something that, is another really big theme.
Saul Marquez:
Love it. Thank you for that. What would you say, Manav, of is one top tech trend tool that’s going to transform healthcare as we know it?
Manav Sevak:
Sure. I think it’s hard to pick one particular technology. I think the biggest trend generally is the concept of care moving outside of traditional settings. I think that, across the board, everybody has thought, and the way that our reimbursement structures are built is very much around, there’s these discrete episodes where people will actually come in for a healthcare visit, right? Or people wait until they get extremely sick to actually reach out and figure out what care they need access to and then get enrolled in these intensive care plans. And the entire shift around care moving outside of traditional clinical settings is twofold. The first part of it is that we’re indexing much more on preventive care, and we’re indexing much more on the concept of holistic care, where you’re looking at social factors around particular patients. You’re looking at data on how patients are taking their medications. Physiologic data on how particular metrics are moving around a particular individual, right? And understanding them in a much broader sense, I think is one that’s been exceptionally powerful, and there’s tons and tons of companies in the ecosystem focused on that. The second is aligning incentives much more effectively around actually optimizing for an outcome for a particular patient. It’s no longer you come in, you have a visit, you leave, and then there’s no context on how you performed as a patient until your next visit. There’s a shift around consumerization, there’s a shift around value-based care that’s really making sure that the way that we actually deliver care is not only becoming much more holistic, but it’s actually becoming better as well and much more high quality.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah, that’s a really great observation, Manav, and so this theme of care shifting to the home is very real. And when this happens and it’s happening and it’s scaling, a lot of what happens is things start to break, so care coordination becomes really important. I think this is a good opportunity for us to dive into maybe a little bit of what Memora does and how exactly you guys are offering value here and maybe some watch outs that, that you guys can help with.
Manav Sevak:
Yeah, sure. So Memora plays at a pretty critical intersection along the concept of care moving outside of clinical settings. Broadly, what we do is we help health systems digitize and automate complex care workflows where, we take a lot of existing best practices that they’ve designed around how they should be managing and supporting patients outside the walls of a particular care delivery setting, digest those into these kind of actionable messages that are sent out to patients on a set schedule, guiding them through an entire episode, and also automating a lot of the different tasks around documenting how that patient is performing, figuring out what information does need to be escalated, and broadly making the concept of care much more algorithmic, right, and much more easy to navigate, both for the care team member inside of their existing tools, but also for the patient. And as a result, we’ve built tons and tons of tools around areas like remote monitoring, we’ve built programs that very aggressively track medication management, appointment management, done quite a bit of work around the concept of care pathways and care journeys and broadly have helped tons of health systems, health plans, digital health companies with the shift to getting a much more holistic view of how a patient is performing, but doing so in a way that’s actually efficient and effective for a care team member to take action on it. So bridging the, the kind of information, the action gap, which I think is a really big area of focus, and you mentioned, watch out, one that we spend a lot of time thinking about is it’s not just the question of can you implement more tools that give you more data or that gives you more insight? It’s can you make that very easily and intelligently actionable and can you make sure that the process is still simple, right? Just because you can collect more data doesn’t mean that you want somebody to have to look at three or four different platforms or to have six different devices in their house that are tracking exactly how they’re performing, right, you want to make sure that a patient still is able to navigate their healthcare simply and it’s not something that becomes burdensome for them.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah well, well said Manav, and it is that, that simplicity you know bringing this additional layer of service, this additional layer of patient-centered care with that invisible layer of tech that really enables providers that are so burned out and patients that are struggling to get what they need. And so you covered some really great things specifically around burnout. Give us an example of, of an application that you guys are doing to really help around this area of burnout because it’s, it’s worth doubling down on.
Manav Sevak:
Yeah, absolutely. And the high-level kind of framing for this is we spend a lot of time thinking about how do you bridge the information to action gap. In a lot of cases, we’re seeing tons of interventions and tons of point solutions around collecting data as to why patients don’t show up to appointments or tons of data on how patient’s blood pressure or blood sugar may change, or tons of information around what instructions they actually followed and what instructions they didn’t follow, right? And all of that information is incredibly valuable to tons of stakeholders in the entire healthcare ecosystem, most notably to care teams. Does that mean that all of that information is something that is easy for our care team to process actively? No. So we’ve kind of shifted the focus away from the concept historically how health systems and health plans have really thought about buying tools, which is we have one particular problem and we’re going to buy one tool that solves that, and it’s going to sit in a silo in a lot of cases, right? Or it’s something that is going to help us acutely fix this, and it’s something that we’ll build on. And then naturally, there’s a lot of interoperability challenges around scaling that efficiently, right? We’ve taken a very different approach of we should build technology that can cover the entirety of that care journey, so you can go broadly across interventions like appointment management and wayfinding and medication management. You can also go deep into particular clinical areas of understanding. If you have a patient on a particular care plan, what instructions and education do you send them? What symptoms do you guide them along, right? And that holistic view gives us a much more detailed sense of how a patient’s performing. So it’s not just Memora’s platform is going to help you collect blood pressure data on this patient, it’s we’ll collect the blood pressure data, we’ll identify when is a measurement actually out of range, automatically follow-up with that patient to say hey we noticed that your blood pressure is slightly out of range based on your blood pressure device, ask them what symptoms they may be experiencing, if any, and then send that consolidated, actionable information back to the care team member. So it’s not just some stream of consciousness that they’re looking at, it’s something that is clinically meaningful for them.
Saul Marquez:
I love it. Yeah, and that’s, that’s powerful. That’s powerful that you guys take a look at that entire continuum of care, go deep, go broad, and don’t offer just a siloed solution. I have to ask, because it’s a theme, it’s been a theme throughout this this conference and in general, the role of AI and ML, right? What role does that play as far as bridging the gap from I love how you said it, information to action. Talk to us about that.
Manav Sevak:
Yeah, sure. There’s tons of noise around all of the really fancy applications of artificial intelligence and ML tools to the healthcare world. There’s tons of work that’s happening in radiology. there’s tons of work that’s happening in speech recognition, tons of work that’s happening in data processing and population health. At the end of the day, we’ve thought about this in two ways. The first way is AI and ML is extremely powerful as a set of tools that allow you to make experiences very, very personalized for patients and for care teams, right? But it’s still possible to keep that experience extremely simple and to the point …, right? So it’s something that kind of is powerful behind the scenes. The second piece and where we’ve deployed a lot of artificial intelligence tools, even on our side, is how do you understand how care is actually being delivered right now? So probably one of the most exciting things for me, obviously I’m biased, but even for me, as the founder of Memora is, we get to see clinical intelligence around how the best in class health systems, health plans are managing a complex patient and what the best possible workflow for managing that complex patient is in a way that, quite frankly, companies just have not historically done or invested a lot of resources in. Part of that is technology enabled because we’ll have artificial intelligence tools or NLP tools that allow us to take some existing data from health systems and then have our clinical programs team review. Part of it is being able to just deliver very intuitive experiences to patients where we’ll use NLP around making sure that instead of a patient just having to respond ABC over text or responding yes, no, the way that they’re used to for typical appointment reminders, they can actually text in openly as if they were actually talking to an extension of their care team, right? And have a much more just humanized experience around navigating their care.
Saul Marquez:
Nice. And it’s small experiences like that that make it personable, personable.
Manav Sevak:
Exactly.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah. I love that. Thank you for sharing that. Well, this has been super interesting. Folks, obviously, this is just tip of the iceberg on what, you know, first of all, Mana can offer, but also what Memora does. So definitely an invitation to, to check them out online. We’ll leave that in the show notes. But, Manav, what’s the best way for people to follow your work and you?
Manav Sevak:
Yeah, absolutely. We’re doing our best to make sure that we’re putting out a lot of the work that we’re doing at different health systems right now, focusing a lot on evidence that we’ve actually seen around a lot of our clinical programs and their efficacy. So we’re constantly trying to put out case studies, academic papers, press releases, things like that. The best way is to make sure that you continue to follow that, is obviously our social accounts like our LinkedIn account or Twitter account, but also checking out our website just because we’re constantly making sure that we, we put a lot of those resources up there as well.
Saul Marquez:
Perfect. Well, hey, we’ll leave links to those social websites on the show notes so that everybody could check those out. Just check them out, click on them. Manav, thank you. This has been really insightful, I appreciate you showing up.
Manav Sevak:
Thanks so much, Saul.
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