Canary Health: Innovating Patient Care (ft. Henry O'Connell)

Thanks for tuning to Digital Voices podcast, where we chat digital transformation, challenges, and opportunities across healthcare and life sciences. And now your host, Ed Marx.

Hey, welcome to another edition of Digital Voices. I'm super excited to talk about not just AI, but actually a very practical Mind-blowing example of what AI can do for us, and that's with the CEO and founder of Canary Health, Henry O'Connell. Welcome to Digital Voices.

It's very nice to be with you. I'm excited to have this opportunity and to spend some time talking.

Yeah, we're gonna jump right into it, but first I want to thank my audience for tuning in. You've made us— not only are we top 10 Apple Podcasts, but also we're Past 1 million downloads. And so I have only the audience to thank for that, and great guests like you, Henry. So again, thank you. And I'm trying to think, we rarely met, just kind of online. I've seen your work and some of the things that you've done, and it really intrigued me, especially the mission about improving our health one voice at a time. And so I want to unpack that a bit. But before we get there, the number one question that we have for all of our guests What songs are on your playlist? What kind of music do you like to listen to?

You know, I'm in my 70s. And so the kids initially teased me about, you know, the late '60s and '70s artists, even John Denver, you know, just the kind of calming, wonderful music that he would play or any of the, you know, Peter, Paul, and Mary. I know this sounds terrible, you know, Seekers from Australia. Yeah. I just, I love when I'm listening to music to have it be a calming, inspiring experience for me. So that's what, that's who I listen to all the time. It's on my playlist.

No, they, and all those groups have great harmony. They do. And great stories. And yeah, John Denver, he would harmonize with himself most, most often. He was a great, great storyteller. And I love a lot of his music as well. So do you have a life message or a mantra or sort of words that you live by?

You know, I constantly tell the team, I tell them, and, and it's a promise that when we engage in doing things that are difficult and at times seem impossible, they're accomplishable because we function and work as a team that has a of vision, such as a team of horses, equally yoked.

Yeah.

Any one of them, any 2 of them, any 3 even, could not pull the load. But working together, equally yoked, they can drag what would otherwise be an impossible load. And I always tell the team, it is one of my greatest honors in life that when I look to my right, I find them yoked to me. And one of my promises is when they look to their left, I will be yoked also.

Yeah, that's great, especially to hear from a leader, right? A lot of times we're we want to be that lead, you know, out there, or maybe not doing any of the work, any of the pulling, and sitting on this on the coach. And it's great to have a leader that thinks about team that way. That's very good. So before we jump into Canary, tell us about yourself. Like tell us your story. Like where did you grow up and? All the way to how you became this inventor.

Well, I grew up in Connecticut in a little town called Wethersfield next to Hartford. And we moved there when I was in kindergarten. And my parents, it was a, they were punching above their weight, if you will. But they wanted us to have the advantage they felt of a better school system, I believe it was, and of opportunity. 4 years later, my Father passed away and my mom had 5 children in the home and she had her father, my grandfather, who was just a godsend for me, who was rehabilitating and lived the rest of his life with us. Um, and that inspired me. I, watching my mom, watching both of them work so hard, but watching my mom after my father's passing, we lived in in poverty that you hope people don't have to live in. We did not have enough money for food. And at the end of the month, you didn't eat. But my mother raised us with a courage that I cannot, I cannot tell you I understand. And that has, that has always inspired me.

Yeah, that, you know, that, that's why I asked the question actually, because you, you learn a lot about people just from their sort of foundation story, if you will, their personal story and And what made them become the person they became. And, and so ultimately you made your way over to Utah.

I did. Yeah.

So tell us about, about that journey.

Well, during the last 20 years before starting this company, I was engaged in working with companies in turnaround situations. I would go in either as a, as a very senior manager or as the CEO. And I did that a number of times. Um, in an interim where my intention was get this straightened out and move to the next thing. I, um, was finishing up in Virginia on, um, a responsibility there. And my daughter, my oldest of 5 children, was accepted at Brigham Young University. She had graduated a year early and, uh, got a summer acceptance to start a summer early at Brigham Young.

Yeah.

And so, uh, our next job was here and we came to Utah for For that job, you know, people would tell me, you know, it's not a winning plan to try to chase your children around, or you can't chase your children around. And I would say, well, I mean, of course you can. And I told them I'm not mature enough yet to be away from one of them, which, which was something that worked out. All of our children went to school here in Utah. All of them graduated here. Some of them got their master's. My oldest son got his medical degree at University of Utah. All of them got married here. We have 9 grandchildren.

Nice.

So that's how we got to Utah.

Yeah, no, that's awesome. So tell us about Canary Health. So how did that come about? So, you know, what's the origin story?

So 9 years ago, a good friend of mine, a gentleman I'd met 45 years ago, I was at the National Institutes of Health at the time, he was at the NSA at the time. He was building mathematical models to decrypt spy messages during the Cold War. Both of us went on to a career. I've mentioned part of what I did, All of it in the healthcare space, medical device type of space. But he went on to work with Ray Kurzweil to develop the first natural language processing. This is Jeff Adams.

Yeah.

He led the team that built Dragon NaturallySpeaking. He did the same thing in legal dictation. And, oh, probably 15 years ago now, Amazon was looking for a team to build the Amazon Echo Alexa. They simply bought the company he was in. And then he went on with, with his team of 17 speech and language scientists and Jeff O'Neill, a PhD in machine learning and a patent lawyer. They went on to build 3 years later and launch the Amazon Echo. So Jeff had been involved in doing that. 9 years ago, we were at a bagel shop down the street from where I am today on University Avenue, talking about an opportunity to do something together. And he was describing a range of different things that he was thinking about, you know, a team of people to tackle the problems that no one else would tackle in speech, you know? And he built that. It's called Cobalt Speech. But at the end of about an hour and a half, I asked him a question. I said, Jeff, you've done a lot of things. I often look at it as, with respect to our lives, as the table that's in front of us or the road that's in front of us. What do you have left on that road that you would like to do? Because certainly what you're describing, you can do.

Yeah.

And he said, well, I've always wanted to use speech and language in the development of products to serve for the analysis of human condition and disease. And I said to him, well, why don't we do that? And there had been 25 years in which some of the brightest people, really truly brightest people on our planet, had been using NLP to try to analyze words for the Analysis of various conditions, and there had been some foundational work that was indicative of success. You know, stuff in Alzheimer's disease and and a lot of twenty-five years of work. Jeff described that to me, and I asked him another question, which is just my nature. I said, "Well, Jeff, you know my my oldest daughter who went to Brigham Young University." I said, "When she was in high school." She would come home from soccer and, and I would look at her and I could tell from her gait whether it was a good day or a bad day.

Yeah.

Oh, and when she looked at me from her facial expressions, you know, and excitement or the opposite. And every parent then says, and every parent also gets the same answer. I would say, how was your day? Her answer would be, and we all know, it was fine. And on would go the stride. And I would always say as a parent, you know, timeout, come on, come on back. I know it's not fine. So why don't you just talk to me a little bit? And I would find out, was it the soccer coach? Was it something that happened in chemistry or somewhere else? You know? And I said to Jeff, I don't have that pleasure anymore. And my daughter's married and she has her first child. So I said, now I'll admit I call her Twice a week. It's more than that, but I'll admit to that. And when the phone rings, I said to Jeff, and Jeff knows my kids very well. I said to Jeff, when the phone rings and it has nothing to do with the words she's speaking, NLP, I know what kind of day she's having.

Yeah.

I know if she's excited or happy or sad or stressed or, you know that. And you know it within moments. And I said to Jeff, how are we doing that? And he said, you know, I, I don't know. And I said, well, if we could do that and we could create a tool in the hand of a clinical team, that would be a very valuable thing to have, you know, to help validate what they're already doing. Because they're doing what I'm doing. They're doing what every parent is doing with their patients. They're doing it. Now, could we validate it objectively? And so that's created Canary Speech.

It's super fascinating. So, so tell us about where it is today, because the promise of it is just outrageously hopeful and great. So where are you today with bringing Canary Health to life?

So what Canary— Canary is today, just on the technical side, that journey led us to 13 issued and 12 pending patents. The approach we took was to look at sublanguage vocal biomarkers, 2,548 of them every 10 milliseconds. And we analyze that in real time. A year and a half ago, we introduced what is called Canary Ambient, which is the ability to listen to a conversation like you and I are having.

Yeah.

And to analyze one or both of those voices for as many as a dozen different diseases. To be able to do that with a clinical team and a patient meant that We could do it not just non-invasively, but non-intrusively.

Yeah.

We could do that across all types of platforms: video conferencing, telephone calls, in-person meetings on smart devices. We could do it in a room in a hospital, and that allowed us then to not be bound by traditional requirements. We could reach anywhere a patient was and still provide objective, actionable information. So today. Canary is has created relationships with healthcare institutions around the world. We recently published with the National Institutes of Health in Osaka, Japan, on mild cognitive impairment. It was published in Lancet. We published last year with Harvard Beth Israel with their team of neurologists on Huntington's disease and Parkinson's disease. We have published with other organizations in in Ireland, in Europe, and other places in Asia and the U.S. Part of that was when you're creating something new in the healthcare space and you're trying to do it as a tool for clinical teams, you do it with clinical teams.

Right.

It's inescapable, you know, because you build into it the same requirements, the same needs, the same process. If it's supposed to be a companion to them, it ought to be in their hand when you're developing it as well. And you have input from patients and input from experts and peer review. And all of that happened. Where we are today is we're launching this product, Canary Ambient product, as an integrated component of the Dragon Copilot and its platform of AI in healthcare. Canary Speech, in listening to audio that the Dragon Copilot is capturing for Clinical dictation purposes, creating doctors' notes and patients' notes, and providing information about historic approaches. What if these kind of things are being said? What do they mean historically? If I could look at a million data elements in in the hospital, but at the same time discreetly and significantly concerning the patient at the moment, we can tell where their anxiety and their depression and their behavioral health is, where their cognitive health is, and we can do that without. expanding anything. The doctor is— and the patient are talking, their notes are being memorialized for them, and Canary Speech is using that same audio in the background with informed consent in the same data security level that the hospital functions at, we function at. All of that's happening in real time, and the doctor's looking at the device they're carrying, which is a smartphone, and they're getting information about the patient's behavioral health. while they're still talking to them. That help drives the next question. It helps improve the interaction with the patient. And it has CPT code reimbursements, which means it's also helping to reinforce the dynamics of time with the patient and recovering for that time so the hospital can continue to function in an economically sound way. So all of that is where Canary is now. And we're doing that in Japanese, Spanish, and English. We're currently working on Dutch. and Arabic. And while we're not bound by language specifically, we're language agnostic. In healthcare, you never take anything for granted. You validate, you verify, you have peer review. And so each of the languages we do that, but that process takes us 4 to 6 weeks to do in a new language with existing diseases. We are deployed in Guatemala. We're deployed in Ecuador. We're deployed in Peru. These are places where technology like ours is extending the reach of their limited healthcare.

Yeah.

To people who might not have it otherwise. And we're also deployed in places like Kansas and places like Washington, D.C., you know, so it's a tool that can reach different places, providing, as I said, objective, accurate information to help the doctor or the clinical team make a decision about the diagnosis. It's considered technically a clinical decision support tool.

Yeah, no, that's brilliant. That's why I was anxious to have you as a guest, because this is one of those examples of AI that is truly, you know, transformative. We use the word transformative and disruptive quite a bit. But this is like game-changing stuff because really you defined a very defined use case going through all the proper channels and checks and balances and rules and regulations. But ultimately, if I understand this correctly, the technology, and it may not be quite to where I'm going to take it right now, but I think this is the capabilities, just by listening to someone's voice, you can ascertain Many different types of diagnosis, not just the ones that are in your current use cases. And it could be a real game changer, right? Because I may not know that I have a cancer, right? Because I may not have any symptoms, and I may be— I'm a typical male that doesn't go and get their annual exam and get blood work done, those sort of things. But through a voice file with consent, it's possible in the future that that's all it's going to take to say, hey, I think there could be an issue here. Let's do the next level of exam, right? I mean, that's, that's where we're headed with this. Yeah.

And then, and, and we're down that path a reasonable way. The path is long enough that it's, it's overwhelmingly exciting to me. What you're talking about is opportunistic screenings, engaging healthcare in a way where it's forward-looking rather than reactive totally. And today Canary has models in the progressive neurological disease area Parkinson's, Huntington's, MS will be out shortly. We have mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's disease. We clarify, we classify those to be in, in the area of cognitive health. In the behavioral health area, we have anxiety, depression, a behavioral health model, and we're adding PTS to that. And then we also are adding multiple others. We're working on our first set of childhood. ADHD and autism, as well as behavioral health for children. And that's being done in concert with organizations like Hackensack Meridian Healthcare and the CDC. So these are really class acts that are working on doing this.

Yeah.

When you think about it, all of the things that I just mentioned, we measure on a 40-second sample. We have AI intelligence during the conversation to separate the voices, to identify the patient and the doctor, to identify a family member in a room. We can separate that automatically. We know when we have enough sample. We process in a streaming mode. So within milliseconds of having 40 seconds, we have a response back to the clinical team. And that could be any one of the diseases I mentioned or all of them at the same time.

Yeah. No, it's brilliant. As you were describing, in You know, today, the way, or historically, the way we've done the patient-to-clinician interaction, you know, is, I mean, looking back now, it's kind of silly, but it was the best that we knew and the technology. But now in real time, the clinician can get this feedback and they could get it through an earpiece or they could look at their, in this case, right, they're looking at their application on their smartphone or what have you. And they can get real-time feedback to go, hey, this is the next best question. This is where you should head down. So the patient may have come in with thinking, I've got a problem with my knee, making this example up on the fly here, but because of the voice and things like that, we may find out that no, it might be some other trauma that we would've never considered. And so we're prompted to ask those questions and go down that road and then discover sure enough, there's a bigger issue or a different issue that's causing the knee. So it's brilliant. Mm-hmm.

Do you know, it's what's one of the wonderful things about it is you have a highly trained individual, a doctor or a clinical team member, a nurse, a nurse practitioner, multiple individuals with experience in their life. They've entered this field because they have a desire. This is what they see as their life's mission.

Yes.

And they, they have this intuitive sense. They have, it's backed by their experience and their expertise, their training and their education. And then all of a sudden you have this objective, independent tool in their hand.

Yeah.

And, and they're looking at this situation and, and they're, they have a belief of where they're going and they're exploring that and they get information in real time that's supporting them or guiding them to another direction. And if you combine that with the AI capabilities of the Dragon Copilot, which can go scrub The hospital's network and come back and say, "We've looked at 100,000 other individuals with these same symptoms, and here here were some of the results." They can do this all in real time now. Imagine how you're augmenting the experience between the doctor and the patient. The next question asked, the diagnosis that they arrive at, the next specialist that they send them to. You know, it's just phenomenal. And you were talking about the road in front of us. My golly! Not only is it with respect to new diseases and other things that we will look at, but other languages, other deployments of that, engaging populations that will now have healthcare at an objectively higher level because we're utilizing tools like this. I get excited about it.

Yeah, I love it. And I can, I sense the excitement. This is really cool. And again, why I wanted to have you on the program. We'll put information about Canary in the show notes. And how to get ahold of you and your organization. But let's pivot a bit to leadership. You've been a longtime leader, having taken over a lot of different companies, helping in turnaround situations. Was there anything early in life that you think helped prepare you for leadership, or was there like a catalyst that, that sort of flipped a switch?

You know, I mentioned to you once already about my mom.

Yeah.

But along the way, there are so many significant people. There was a gentleman named Jack Shea. He was, he was the gym coach in 7th grade. Now in 6th grade, I was the fattest kid in my elementary school. And in 7th grade, there was one child from a second elementary school who was fatter than me. And Jack Shea, I believe, although he never mentioned it, knew about my father's death. And it had been a few years before. Um, and he also was the coach of the soccer team. And the, the Wethersfield High was twice in a row state champions, you know, type of soccer level.

Yeah.

Of play. And this is the, the only junior high feeding that system. And he pulled me into soccer. I, I started, I believe, all but one, all but one soccer game from that moment forward.

Mm-hmm.

And I don't think I deserved it. By the time I was in 9th grade, middle school, 7th, 8th, and 9th, I thought, oh gosh, I'm a, I'm a soccer star. You know, I'm going to go up to a team that competes for the state championship regularly. You know, I'm, it's going to be an amazing thing. We had run 2 races that year, my 9th grade. And I had run the day they ran the mile, which was required at the time. The day they ran the mile, I was out for some reason and I had to run it by myself and I ran. the mile almost a minute faster than anyone else in the school.

Wow.

In 9th grade. Wow. And Jack Shea had been there at the track timing it, so he knew it happened. And then I won. We had one meet and I won that meet for the mile. And then Jack Coach Shea came to me at the end of soccer, at the end of 9th grade, and he said, Henry, I need to talk with you. And this is such a critical thing. Honesty has no replacement in life. He said, Henry, you're never gonna be any good at soccer, but you're an incredible runner. And I thought I was a hero in soccer. And he said, when you get to high school next year, I've already talked to the track coach and I want you to go out for cross-country. And I said at the time to him, well, what is cross-country? He said, it's running. Just when you hear the announcement, go out for cross-country. I ended up being an All-American multiple times. I set 34 course records in college. I ran in the US Olympic trials in the marathon. Jack Shea was right. And it came from just being honest. It was a lesson that I learned that if you're just willing to accept, if you have the humility to accept honesty, it can drive the course of your life.

Yeah. Love it.

Yeah.

Henry, this has been great. I could, I could listen to you for, for many, many hours. I'll have to make— next time I'm in Utah, I'll have to make my way to that bagel shop.

Please do.

And, uh, buy you a bagel. But, uh, super fascinating. One, I love the passion that you bring to really make a difference and transform people's lives all around the world. I mean, this is something that's super scalable, and, and what you've done with your partner and your team, you know, truly transforming, uh, healthcare as we know it. We talked a lot about Your life message, which again, teamwork and, you know, a lot of the things that your mom, your wonderful mom taught you, uh, growing up and, and under that sort of hardship. And then we talk a little bit about your career and your journey and Canary Speech. We went into a little bit of detail. And then I love the story of Jack Shea telling the truth. You know, honesty has no replacement. And then for you to have the humility, which is hard, especially at that age, but even harder probably as adults to have humility to accept You know, some honest feedback from time to time. It's just amazing what you shared. What did we miss, or is there anything you want to double down on? I'll give you the last word.

One of the things we hear in business regularly is that there's no substitution for an excellent team. One of the misunderstandings I believe at times is that people say, oh, I have this A, you know, people need to be an A. player, you know, versus a B player or whatever. I don't believe that that's true. I don't believe that we are A players all the time. I believe that we have A teams that are built of A and B and C players that because of those around them are pulling the yoke next to them.

Yeah.

In a way that in their lives they may never have before. A teams are not all A players. They're A teams Because of how they function together.

I love that. You might even say that if you had only A players, you probably would not be an A-team.

I would agree with you.

Yeah.

And I believe there's a level across the team, there has to be a recognition that learning from each other, which requires humility, learning from each other is the greatest key to success.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

Henry, you're amazing. What you're doing is amazing. I'm definitely gonna come take you to that coffee, to the bagel shop. Thanks for being a guest on Digital Voices.

Thank you very much.

Thank you for listening to Digital Voices Podcast with Ed Marx. If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe on your preferred streaming service and leave a rating and review. And most importantly, thanks again for listening.