Chris Molaro calls his six years in the US Army leading a Field Artillery platoon his biggest honor. But he says his “biggest leadership failure” came after his platoon redeployed back home. In this episode of the Breaking Health podcast, Host Steve Krupa connects with a young veteran who is using inspiration from a tragic loss of one of his soldiers to depression to improve mental healthcare for everyone. “We could have intervened if we had a better system in place,” Molaro says.    

Our Host Steve Krupa has a visitor. Aetion CEO Carolyn Magill pops by Steve’s office at HealthEdge to explain how Aetion raised a round of capital it wasn’t seeking. She also delves deeply into how Aetion’s analysis of different types of data – genomic, socioeconomic, EHR’s – can change how healthcare is delivered and how are costs covered.

You can WATCH this Breaking Health podcast interview here. 

In this podcast, Ardy Arianpour, CEO of Seqster (pronounced Seekster), shares the origin story for creating what he calls, “the Mint.com of health care. Seqster is creating a clear, direct, one-password-only channel between patients and ALL their healthcare data – EHR, genetic and fitness, etc. The start-up is marking its offering to payers and providers and already has secured access to data from 3,000 hospitals and 45,000 physician offices as well as DNA Labs and data-collecting Medtechs like ResMed and DexCom. Hear Arianpour vision for the future of healthcare data.

Vital Connect CEO Nersi Nazari talks data with Host Steve Krupa in this episode of the Breaking Health podcast. VitalConnect has developed a line of sensors capable of tracking conditions of patients at home and in the hospital. According to the company, its VitalPatch wearable biosensor is a lightweight, wireless, and records eight patient vital signs. The VitalConnect Platform integrates the VitalPatch biosensor with mobile and cloud-based software and analytics. The company closed on $33 million in a Series C last year, drawing capital from Baxter Ventures and MVM Life Sciences. 

A few years ago, technology veteran Doug Hirsch was given a prescription that he wasn’t 100% sure he needed, especially after the first pharmacy he brought it to told him the drug would cost over $400. Hirsch walked out with the unfilled prescription and decided to shop around. What he discovered was a prescription marketplace that seemed to offer little rhyme or reason. This mystery led to the creation of GoodRx and an app that allows patients to shop around more easily. Six years later, GoodRx users have saved over $10 billion and one-third of prescribing physicians recommend it to their patients. In this podcast, host Steve Krupa talks with Hirsch about the value of PBMs and the future of GoodRx.

Punit Soni’s LinkedIn profile includes Intel, Google, and Motorola. But Soni tells the Breaking Health podcast that he believes the “largest, most interesting” tech company will be in health care. Can Suki be that company? Soni sees an enormous opportunity to help physicians be physicians by replacing keyboards with AI-enabled digital assistants that can record electronic health record (HER) documentation. Can this digital assistant improve patient care and reduce physician burnout by getting docs away from data entry and back to doctoring? “We want the doctors to be the bosses of their own lives,” Soni says. “They need to rediscover the joy of practicing medicine.” Suki already is an interesting company to watch. 

Lark CEO and Founder Julia Hu had launched two cleantech start-ups early in her career, but a childhood managing a chronic disease predestined her to start Lark Health, developer of an AI-empowered “coach” that can help people with chronic disease manage their own health. 

Arvind Rajan left his managing director post at LinkedIn intent upon two things – taking some time off with his family and finding a new venture that would be hard, important, and transformative to the world. Rajan and his co-founders, James Chaukos and Vince Kim – saw an imbalance in how patients with late-stage kidney disease were being treated. Cricket Health – identified as one of the Fierce 15 Companies in healthcare – is working to balance the scales in favor of patients by building teams of nephrologists, dieticians, even experienced patient mentors to help people before they reach kidney failure.

Breaking Health Host Steve Krupa returns to the Big Chair, reconnecting with old friend and former portfolio company CEO Tony Miller. In this podcast, the pair unpack the strategy of Bind, the “on-demand healthcare insurance” company  working to change how employers insure their employees. Find out more at yourbind.com.

Susan DeVore has been in and around the healthcare industry for most of her life – long before she became president and CEO of Premier Inc., a company that unites an alliance of more than 4,000 hospitals and health systems and approximately 165,000 other providers and organizations to transform healthcare. 

It’s a little-known fact that Susan’s roots at Premier date back to her childhood when her father, a biomedical engineer, worked for a predecessor to the company. After working at Ernst & Young – including time as a partner and senior healthcare industry management practice leader, among other roles – she got the call to interview at Premier. 

No one was aware of Susan’s company legacy at that time, but after she joined, there were longtime employees who remembered her attending the company picnic or other gatherings as a young teenager. 

Susan’s lifelong focus on improving the healthcare system and her current role at Premier – driven by insight from such a vast network of care delivery organizations – combine to give her an incredibly valuable perspective for solving healthcare’s biggest challenges. Premier’s network enables it to maintain a dataset that encompasses roughly 45% of patients in the US. Those data inform Susan’s leadership and the decisions the company makes to help solve cost and quality challenges and develop a unique model of care delivery. 

At the HIMSS Global Conference & Exhibition in February Susan will be delivering a keynote session titled, “Healing from Within: Leading Change, Inspiring Action.” But you can hear her first on this episode of Breaking Health Podcast. Susan’s conversation with Keith Figlioli covers a number of pressing topics including: 

• Reducing Waste in the System – Susan talks about how there’s still 30% waste in the system and three times unwanted variation in care delivery, and how these challenges can’t be solved by insurance companies or the government. She believes the only way to tackle them is head-on, from within the system, and shares her thoughts about how data, technology, and influence within healthcare systems are all critical to driving transformation.

• Changing the Social System – the decades-old social system that the healthcare industry is built upon is one that’s difficult to change. But it’s starting to change in experimental ways, driven by innovators and early adopters who recognize that it’s unsustainable for healthcare costs to grow at twice the rate of the economy, and who want to do something about it. Susan talks about how and why it’s easy to stay in a fee-for-service world and shares her thoughts on the main barriers to change.

• The Path to Alternative Payments – as Susan sees it, the big thing that’s holding health systems back from adopting alternative payment models is uncertainty. If providers that haven’t adopted or are only experimenting in alternative payments think there’s a chance that fee-for-service might last longer, it’s much harder for them to make the leap. However, she talks about her view of federal regulations and how the “training wheels are coming off” to force change more quickly.

• The Next Big Thing: Making Big Data Small – while increasing access to healthcare data is playing an important role in transforming the industry, one big challenge right now is the sheer volume of data that exists. Susan talks about how the next big thing on the horizon will be figuring out ways to make vast amounts of data more usable. She talks about how to get “small data” into the workflow so it’s available for physicians and patients to use in making informed decisions that change the care being delivered.

To hear Susan DeVore talk about these topics and more, listen to this episode of Breaking Health Podcast.