Taking the Vital Signs of Healthcare Innovation

Key takeaways

Fragmentation of care is a really big problem, and communication is a really big problem. If people need to work in teams to deliver effective care, they need effective communication tools.

— Dr. Florencia Halperin, FORM Chief Medical Officer

‍

The software [a healthcare team] uses to make their decisions every day is the most effective way to close the gap between theory and practice.

— Andrew Hines, Canvas Medical Founder & CEO

‍

We’re seeing health systems throughout the US going through large digital transformations, where they’re moving from many disparate point solutions over to platform solutions.

— Milind Parate, Ventures for Northwell Holdings Managing Director

The human-centered future of healthcare

Future Perfect is M13’s thought leadership series, where we convene investors and founders to reflect on the lessons and innovations that inform how we will build the future. In May, we gathered in New York City to hear from the vanguards of technology, innovation, and investing.

Many would agree that today’s healthcare system isn’t working—for patients or for providers. Under the heavy weight of the Covid-19 pandemic, intensely bureaucratic paperwork needs, legacy data systems, and long hours, care providers are reporting record levels of burnout. In turn, patients are receiving less effective care.

But innovative technologies are shaping, healing, and breaking our existing healthcare systems. How do we establish a healthcare system that’s more humane on both sides of the care equation?

Dr. Florencia Halperin (FORM Chief Medical Officer), Andrew Hines (Canvas Medical Founder & CEO), and Milind Parate (Ventures for Northwell Holdings Managing Director) sat down with moderator Brandon Fenn (Cooley Partner) to discuss the human-centered future of healthcare.

Vital signs: The state of health tech innovation

The panel opened with the question: If you could take the “vital signs” of the healthcare industry right now, what would you see?

Milind Parate, Managing Director of Ventures for Northwell Holdings (a branch of New York’s largest healthcare provider), began by highlighting the trend of declining margins and rising operating costs at hospitals and provider centers, especially post-pandemic.

“This is largely attributed to the workforce challenges that health systems are facing, whether it's physician burnout, nurse burnout, staffing shortages, or expenses associated with flex staffing, as well as supply expenses and increasing drug prices,” he explains. “All of these pieces are contributing to hospital operating margin compression.”

In response to this pressure, “we’re seeing health systems throughout the US going through large digital transformations, where they’re moving from many disparate point solutions over to platform solutions,” Milind continues. “As a result of this environment, there’s increasing scrutiny around the return on investment that new technologies can bring to the table as well as integration costs, implementation costs, navigating change management, and what the processes are for these tech companies to seamlessly come in.” Hunger for smoother systems and more updated technology means the industry is eager for new solutions but that eagerness is balanced by a need for these companies to prove their value.

In addition to educating providers on how to valuably integrate their offerings, health tech players also need to educate patients. This era of research, innovation, and expanding access to healthcare brings potential for both progress and misunderstanding.

For example, when it comes to weight management, “the advice to just work out more and eat less is old fashioned and puts blame on individuals,” says Dr. Florencia Halperin, Chief Medical Officer at FORM, a virtual comprehensive obesity medicine telehealth clinic. “When we started out, nobody knew what Ozempic was, and now it’s on the front page of the newspaper all the time. This has been a tremendous opportunity to educate people about what we've known for a very long time, which is that obesity is a disease, a chronic medical condition which needs to be treated that way, and there are a lot of tools for doing that. Unfortunately, a less positive effect has also crept in, which is this idea that you can just buy a prescription [to lose weight].”

Tech for teamwork

One major theme of the conversation was that healthcare doesn’t depend on a single provider’s knowledge; it’s a team effort.

“Fragmentation of care is a really big problem, and communication is a really big problem,” says Florencia. “If people need to work in teams to deliver effective care, they need effective communication tools to deliver effective care. We get care in lots of different places, and the sharing of information presents barriers to delivering and receiving effective care.”

These communication breakdowns are part of the problem Canvas Medical is trying to address with its healthcare platform, which includes electronic medical record (EMR) management, a payments platform, and software and API tools for developer teams at healthcare institutions.

“Standards of care have to evolve—but I think that the rate at which they evolve is just devastatingly slow,” says Andrew Hines, Canvas CEO. “The reason why medical records are so important is not to record information but to support decision making and advance the standard of care a whole lot faster. Medical record technology is important because it is a proven solution to a widespread and serious problem: unwarranted variations in care.”

Unwarranted variations in care are when there are differences in care across patients that can't be explained by the patients’ disease or preferences, Andrew explains. They can be a result of everything from under-resourced clinical teams, to improper training, to unconscious bias or health equity issues. Factors like the time of day an appointment is scheduled can have a major impact on a patient’s health and care journey, despite not being directly relevant.

According to Andrew, “There’s huge opportunity here, and an enormous body of evidence that the software [a healthcare team] uses to make their decisions every day is the most effective way to close the gap between theory and practice” to provide more effective care.

Investing in the future

From a venture angle, Milind offers a perspective from the other side of the health tech ecosystem. “We’re always looking for technologies that address what my colleagues [Florencia and Andrew] are talking about,” he says. But in this economic environment, “there's been much more discipline in terms of how we're looking at technologies and whether or not we should bring them into the broader ecosystem.”

One area of focus is “obviously, AI and generative AI,” Milind says. Elements of this technology are already being incorporated into healthcare, be that through medical imaging or through using natural language processing (NLP) to seamlessly feed patient data into medical records to smooth patient intake and communication between providers.

In addition to integrating facets of AI into health technologies, Milind also notes, “elements of health equity, social determinants of health, and looking at socioeconomic factors—all of that’s going to empower the patient and drive the consumerization of healthcare and patient-centered care. It’s all interconnected.”
‍

Thank you to our speakers

Dr. Florencia Halperin is the Chief Medical Officer at FORM, a virtual obesity medicine clinic. She has dedicated her career to clinical care and research on the most effective ways to help people lose weight to improve their health. At FORM, Dr. Halperin leads an expert clinical team in the delivery of high quality medical care for people living with obesity.

Prior to her work at FORM, Dr. Halperin was the co-founder and co-director of the Brigham and Women’s Center for Weight Management and Metabolic Surgery, as well as the Chief of Endocrinology at Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital, both of Harvard Medical School. Dr. Halperin has been the recipient of numerous awards in recognition of her dedication to teaching and to patient care, including Castle Connolly America’s Top Doctors and the Schwartz Center Award for Compassionate Care.

Dr. Halperin completed medical school and clinical training in endocrinology at Harvard Medical School.

Andrew Hines is a statistician, programmer, and clinical informaticist. In 2015 he started Canvas Medical, the first care modeling company. In 2014 he helped build one of the largest real-time healthcare analytics products while serving on the data science team at Practice Fusion. In 2010 he built the analytics team at Nor1, which introduced new scheduling technologies to the hospitality industry and was later acquired by Oracle.

Andrew has Bachelor's degrees in statistics and decision sciences from San Francisco State University and a master's degree in management science and engineering from Stanford University. He lives by the Pacific Ocean with his wife, a Family Nurse Practitioner dedicated to vulnerable patient populations, and their two sons.

Milind Parate is Managing Director of Ventures for Northwell Holdings, the venture investment arm of Northwell Health, where he is responsible for the group’s direct venture investments and potential commercialization opportunities across new business and joint ventures.

Mr. Parate has 20+ years of healthcare sector experience across venture capital, startups, public equity investment research, and investment banking (corporate finance, M&A), having spent time in therapeutics, healthcare services, and the digital health/health technology verticals.

Mr. Parate received his BA in economics from the University of Chicago and his MSc in health policy from the London School of Economics.

Thank you to our sponsors