Data in Healthcare with Ron Vianu

If you've ever tried to find a doctor in the United States, you likely know how hard it is to find one who's the right fit—it takes quite a bit of research to find good information to make an informed choice. Wouldn't it be nice to easily find a doctor who is the right fit for you? Using data, Covera Health aims to do just that in the radiology specialty.Ron Vianu: I think the tools are really improving year over year to a significant degree, but like anything else, the tools themselves are only as useful as how you apply them. You can have the most amazing tools that could understand very large datasets, but you know how you approach looking for solutions, I think can dramatically impact. Do you yield anything usefulGinette Methot: I’m Ginette,Curtis Seare: and I’m Curtis,Ginette: and you are listening to Data Crunch,Curtis: a podcast about how applied data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence are changing the world.Ginette: Data Crunch is produced by the Data Crunch Corporation, an analytics training and consulting company.If you're a business leader listening to our podcast and would like to move 10 times faster and be 10 times smarter than your competitors, we're running a webinar on February 13th where you can learn how to do this and more. Just go to datacrunchcorp.com/go to sign up today for free. If you're a subject matter expert in your field, like our guest today, and you're looking to understand data science and machine learning, brilliant.org is a great place to dig deeper. Their classes, help you understand algorithms, machine learning concepts, computer science basics, and many other important concepts in data science and machine learning. The nice thing about brilliant.org is that you can learn in bite-sized pieces at your own pace. Their courses have storytelling, code writing and interactive challenges, which makes them entertaining, challenging, and educational. Sign up for free and start learning by going to brilliant.org/data crunch. And also the first 200 people that go to that link will get 20% off the annual premium subscription. Today we chat with Ron Vianu, the CEO of Covera Health. Let's get right to it. Curtis: What inspired you to get into what you're doing, uh, to start Covera health? Where did the idea come from and what drives you? So if we could start there and learn a little bit about you and the beginnings of Covera health, that would be great. Ron: Sure. Uh, and I, I guess it's important to state that, you know, I'm a problem solver by nature, and my entire professional career, I've been a serial entrepreneur building companies to solve very specific problems. And as it relates to Covera, the, the Genesis of it was understanding that there were two problems in the market with respect to, uh, the healthcare space, which is where we're focused that were historically unsolved and there were no efforts really to solve them in, from my perspective, a data-driven way. And that was around understanding quality of physicians that is predictive to whether or not they'll be successful with individual patients as they walk through their practice. And so if you, and we're focused on the world of radiology, which today is highly commoditized and what that means is that there was a presumption that wherever you get an MRI or a CT study for some injury or illness, it doesn't matter where you go. It's more about convenience and price perhaps. Whereas what we understand given our research and the, the various things that we've published since our beginning is that one, it's like every other medical specialty. It's highly variable. Two, since radiology supports all other medical specialties in a, as a tool for diagnosis, diagnostic purposes, any sort of variability within that specialty has a cascading effect on patients downstream. And so for us, the beginning was, is this something that is solvable through data?