Future of Global Informatics_Ep 15_Tatyana Kanzaveli: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
TJ Southern:
Hey, y’all! Welcome to the Outcomes Rocket Network – The Future of Global Informatics Podcast, where we discuss global informatics through conversations with industry leaders and innovators so that you can understand what it is, what it does, and how it shapes the healthcare of our future. I am your host, TJ Southern.
TJ Southern:
All right! Hey, y’all! Hey, y’all! Good day, good day, and welcome to another episode of the Future of Global Informatics. It’s your girl, TJ Southern, and today we have Tatyana Kanzaveli, Kanzaveli, Tatyana Kanzaveli. So you guys, let me kind of give you a little bit of background on Tatyana. She is one of the hottest things in the healthcare I.T. market right now, and she has graced, she has given us the pleasure and the honor of grace in our mic today to give us, like all the little tidbits and all of the things that we would need to know as it relates to what’s coming up in healthcare and how things are evolving in healthcare. And I’m just going to stop talking and let her tell her story to get you guys all excited. So, Tatyana, tell the people about yourself. Tell the people about yourself.
Tatyana Kanzaveli:
Oh, thank you. I’m honored to be on your show. You are an amazing, dynamic, engaging leader, so thank you for that. My background is technology, specifically informatics and data. So I’ve been designing systems and I was working with data in many different industries. And then I was at Pricewaterhouse in the SAP practice when I worked on distributed system deployment, I worked with AI companies for a while and then it just happened that suddenly, in, totally unexpected, I was diagnosed with cancer. And that was very sad and very unfortunate, but it forced me to start thinking about healthcare because that’s the industry I didn’t work, I worked with lots of different industries, but not the healthcare. And yeah, so one of the questions I asked my oncologist, it’s an obvious one, why me? And the response was, well, we don’t know, why we don’t know. Oh, this, we don’t have data. I was like, what kind of data? And I started thinking about all kinds of data that potentially can impact causation, treatment options, in fact, outcomes for people who get sick. That’s kind of what forced me and empowered me to start a company, so it’s all about data. And then once I started looking at different data sources, and I literally mapped everything from genetics to environment stressors, so it’s not just data that your EHR has, right? This EHR has very limited point-in-time lab data, if you will, and measurements. So you come in, they take your blood pressure away, temperature, until the next annual checkup, unless you have an emergency, you come in, they take other measurements and maybe x-rays and scans and all of that, but it’s like, doesn’t necessarily tell us what led to escalation and then, so there are a lot of things that can be improved in healthcare. We all know that, so that’s basically how I started getting into healthcare.
TJ Southern:
Let me tell you all this, okay, like I always tell you how at the beginning of my podcast, make sure that you have a pen and a piece of paper because y’all never know these guests that I have on my cast, they always drop us gems and I just fill it in my spirit that Tatyana got some gems to drop for us. Okay, so now you talk about your journey and how you got cancer and how that kind of just, you know, propelled you into this part of your entrepreneurship journey. Y’all already heard, now she is, she didn’t been around the world in 360 days, y’all. She then worked for some big-name companies, but then it just so happened that she happened to be thrust into healthcare. Okay, so we know that your diagnosis, having cancer, kind of inspires your work, but tell us about your company. Tell us about the company that you have right now because I’m seeing it, just tell me about it, girl.
Tatyana Kanzaveli:
Yeah, well, thank you. So you know how it all started, and then when I start looking at all kind of different data points that we all will need to have in healthcare going forward, I quickly realized there is no easy way for us to collect in a meaningful, for the patients, way because we can’t look at patients as a data source, right? So we need to really understand what they’re going through and how to help them to manage disease and get better, and at the same time, how the data that they have can be used to help them and other patients. So with that in mind, we kind of started building the framework that is integrated with care team, and it enables care team to create like integrated care plans that can include any aspect from medications to highly prescriptive level exercises and diet, behavioral health assessment surveys, educational materials, and it can be integrated across multiple specialists and family members, social workers. It gets automatically personalized or manually personalized for each patient. You can create templates. It gets the patient their web app or Apple or Android app, and we integrate with gazillions of different wearable devices and sensors so you can get environmental data, device data from wearable devices along with patient-reported and everything in between, you know, back to the care team, but we also have a data lake in the back end where all of that gets integrated. The cool thing is that they can triage. You can create an algorithm that can personalize or suggest the care team on using data on how certain things can be improved, personalized, or just, when you have, let’s say, data that come from Fitbit, every single heartbeat, or you get air quality data, you get weight data, you get patient-reported pain level, whatever, so it’s hard for human to manually look at all those data points independently. So you need to utilize algorithm or even rules or some kind of ways of looking at trends, and also the area that’s very interested to me is correlation between different data sets, right? So it’s not just looking at one independently from another one. So we have all of that, we’ve deployed that UCSF with the Children’s Hospital Philadelphia, Columbia, and many, many, many healthcare organizations, but what happens then, once you have this super robust way of helping people with complex diseases, with rehabs, with, in work with pediatrics, with adults, you suddenly get massive amounts of multidimensional data that contain so much good information that they can start thinking about the next step in healthcare, which is absolutely fascinating, and that is using that data to create digital twin.
TJ Southern:
Oh my God, let me tell you, like all of this right now that you’re telling me is blowing my mind because I just had a student, and we were working on some social determinants of health as it relates to black maternal mortality rates, and just to know that there is this product out there like this, because that was one thing that when we were doing our research, we were really finding out that there are a lot of outside things, you know, like the air pollution, like the food that we eat, like having access to green vegetables, being in a certain area and not having access to certain things, but to be able to have such a dynamic, robust program, let me tell you.
Tatyana Kanzaveli:
It’s interesting you mentioned this because we’re working with Miller School of Medicine in Miami along with Amazon on the project that exactly relates to the things you’ve mentioned. So for people in underserved communities where we can just look at okay, does it take Med or not, because we’re looking at the sleep for example, and we’re measuring air quality, noise level, you know, we look at all the other things that people don’t think about. We’re looking at doing things in languages like Spanish language and explain people things, and then the other thing that I really love, where it gets integrated into healthcare plan is behavioral aspects of healthcare. So you can help people start building good habits, …, and it doesn’t happen overnight and it doesn’t happen if you tell me, stop smoking, it’s bad, we know that. But how you can lead people, you know, gradually, baby steps, no punishments, little rewards. It’s completely, right? Yeah.
TJ Southern:
So when I tell you that I am, Oh my God, I am in such awe of the work that you and your team are doing because it is world-changing, not just life-changing, it’s world-changing. And we have a lot of, like you said, a lot of disease processes out there that just aren’t, you know, where you can’t just focus on only the data that you’re getting from the patient. It’s so many outside things that people don’t think about that is actually affecting that patient’s care. So kudos to you and your team, kudos. I’m telling you, I’m excited and I just cannot wait to see where everything goes. So now my biggest question to you is what is the biggest challenge that you’ve seen doing this project or doing something of this magnitude? What is the biggest challenge that you’ve seen?
Tatyana Kanzaveli:
The biggest challenge is, you know, in healthcare that organizations, especially the ones that work with underserved communities like community hospitals, they don’t have funds.
TJ Southern:
Come on, say it girl.
Tatyana Kanzaveli:
I would love to do everything for free, for social good, but I’m for-profit company, I need to pay my people, I need to …, I mean, so we have to have sustainable business model. And to find the ways, I started this company to actually do an impact to improve people’s health, and we build fascinating, robust, like superb offering, right? Together, the hands of people who need it in a way that we can sustain our growth and deliver value. It’s hard, it’s hard, it’s hard.
TJ Southern:
Man, and that’s, that is a common, that is common. Let me tell you, that’s a very, very common challenge, because even when we were going through the wave of implementing the EMRs, when they were first starting to roll out, you had a lot of rural hospitals that did not have an EMR for quite some time. And you actually still have rural hospitals that are struggling with having an EMR, right, because they don’t have the funding. So you’re right, that is a barrier, especially for a lot of our underserved communities of actually having the technology where they need it most, which is in the healthcare systems. So yeah, I totally, totally agree with you. My question to you is, with all of this data, right, and the technologies and what’s being built, like what is your team comprised of? What type of healthcare individuals or disciplines do you use on your teams?
Tatyana Kanzaveli:
So we, with the technology provider, we partner with different specialists and experts from healthcare side with, everything that is done using our technologies can be, is white-labeled. And basically, you don’t see us, you see My Heart by Children’s Hospital or you know, … offering by Miller School of Medicine, so my goal is to work with experts in healthcare, with specialists and patients, and configure, set up, adapt the framework that we have because we’ve done so much that we can deploy highly sophisticated things very fast in a highly personalized way, but, and I’m all about working and understanding requirements. So I’m not the one who will tell you, drop everything, change everything how you do things, right? So my goal is to give something that you can actually use and it wouldn’t cost you tons of money, it wouldn’t take you till the end of your life to deploy. So it’s kind of agile, so within a few weeks you can start using it, the patients can start using it. And I am working with, whether it’s sleep expert, chronic pain, cardiovascular, rare diseases, oncology, so I’m working with all those experts and help them. We do a lot of stuff with researchers, they love us. So any type of research we were part of, give me like letters, R01, R21, R31, of so many different grants as well, so we’re are like clinical research and prevention … across many disease areas.
TJ Southern:
I love it, I love it because I’m a, my background is a nurse informaticist by trade, as you know. And I love the fact that even in research you do use us, you use a lot of clinical disciplines inside of those research projects. So I love the fact that, you know, not only you are all on the healthcare technology side, but you understand that you have to get the technology into the clinicians’ hands to be able to use it. And that not only getting it into the clinician’s hands but actually partnering with the clinicians to make sure that it is a tool that can be used properly by the clinicians and properly by the patients. So I truly, truly love that.
Tatyana Kanzaveli:
I want to really help, that it fits in your workload, it’s not a burden for you. So we really, you know, we have weekly calls or biweekly calls with physician teams just to see how we can make their experience better, and of course, you know patients as well, because it has to work for both.
TJ Southern:
I love that. I love the fact that, you know, you understand that technology cannot be a burden, but it’s actually work. We have so many start-ups that, you know, yes, they have a wonderful idea, but it’s like, dude, we do not want to use this site, it is not efficient for us. So I love the fact that you are thinking about that. You and your team are thinking about that all of the time. So what are you most excited about as it relates to the future of what it is that your organization is doing?
Tatyana Kanzaveli:
Right, so I think I mentioned this terminology, but I’m pretty bullish on the whole concept of digital twin. So imagine that we can get tons of data that can represent you as a person, right? And it could be, you know, for certain disease areas and eventually, it will be overall, but we can start using digital representation of a patient to model potential treatments and rapidly figure out what exactly type of intervention will help you to get better outcomes faster. You see what I mean? So we don’t have like, with my dad, for example, he had multiple health issues and what was happening, he would be prescribed to do certain things, and he would end up in the ER and they will figure out, oh, this, he had this dosage of that that impacted something else he had …, And they’ll go through those iterations for months, right? And digital twin will be very helpful, and eventually, if you step back and start thinking about everything the way it’s done now, I predict those things will change. Let me give you a simple example. You have headache and you go, you buy Excedrin, right? I have headache, I go and buy Excedrin, and we take the same two pills, right? Now, you and I are different. The reason that we kind of are okay with having one size fits all … because we can’t, at that time, when all those things have been developed, even at very simple level of dosage of drugs, we couldn’t do it differently, right? So I predict that whether it happens, you know, in ten years, or five, or sooner, we’ll get to data-driven, personalized precision care, and digital twin and data-driven representation of people will enable us to do that.
TJ Southern:
Oh, my God, yes, and let me tell you, just sitting here thinking about the types of care, because you’re right, when we have patients with multiple comorbidities, it is really hard for the coordination between all of those teams. And you’re right, you’ll have one doctor prescribed to do one thing and then it’ll throw your patient into a tailspin, and then they’ll come back and say, oh, well, you can’t do that because you have this going on, so you’re absolutely right. It seems to me as if the digital twinning will create a library for care. And so that is the part that excites me the most because that library then allows the caregivers to have readymade access of how they will not only take care of this patient, but how they will practice in the future. So I, absolutely, I think that’s going to be a game-changer. And you’re right, whether it happens five years from now, ten years from now, I think we all need to be, especially as healthcare providers, we all need to be engaged and aware that this technology is out there and that is coming. So I’m going to ask you this final question. I’m telling y’all, I have enjoyed this conversation with Tatyana. I don’t know if y’all have, but I definitely have, and I’m going to tell you a little secret, she is a diva. She is a diva. She is after my own heart, so I have enjoyed this conversation with her.
Tatyana Kanzaveli:
Me too.
TJ Southern:
So what final words or what words of encouragement do you want to leave with our listeners, whether it be in healthcare, in life? Just what are your parting words? What words of wisdom do you want to leave our listeners today?
Tatyana Kanzaveli:
One thing that I constantly kind of try to communicate to people that if you have any dreams, any things that you really want to do, you can always find excuses why you can’t do it now. And I had those excuses for a while until I got cancer and I just dropped it like I have to start doing things I care about.
TJ Southern:
Come on, come on.
Tatyana Kanzaveli:
Do it, do it. I want to encourage people to really look deep inside themselves and figure out what they really care about and start doing those things.
TJ Southern:
Come on now, the world will be such a better place and there will be so much more happier people. Yeah, let me add that, you will be so much more happier. Well, Miss Tatyana, thank you so much. It was a pleasure, it was a joy, and it was definitely an honor to have you on our cast today. I am just so elated for what you and your organization is getting ready to do in the future, and I cannot wait to see you just skyrocket. I’m telling you and your organization, I look forward to the digital twinning I look forward to what your organization has to release, and so thank you again so much for taking your time out with us today. …
TJ Southern:
Hey, y’all! Thanks for joining us today for another episode of the Outcomes Rocket Network – The Future of Global Informatics Podcast. If your organization is looking for informatics talent, go to www.Beryllus.net. That is www. B E R Y L L U S .net, and we can assist you in finding some of the best nursing informatics talent this continent has to offer. We’ll talk to you later! Have a great day! See ya!
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