Modernizing Healthcare | Evidation Health CEO Deb Kilpatrick

I'm willing to participate in this ecosystem that you're telling me about, Deb, but you know what? I still got to go into the office every time I want to get an objective measure of how I'm doing. That's not going to work. And so we felt strongly that there should be a company, and we are it now at Evidation, that allowed us to be free of this, that allowed the system to measure outcomes in a more 24/7 kind of way. But there's a big problem in that the healthcare system has been solidly stuck in the 20th century in terms of how it measures what's working or not. And when we talk about what's measured— what's working or not in healthcare, I truly, literally mean that. If you are on a drug or if you are on a— if you have a device or have an implant, do you feel better? Does that feeling better translate into a measurable difference by objective, measurable things? Like a treadmill test in a doctor's office, or like an MRI of your knee. Does your feeling better translate to concrete objective evidence that you are better? And having that system be stuck in an episodic brick-and-mortar anchored construct is really the big hurdle, right? Because if I've got all kinds of data flowing through me, hey, I'm willing to use it. I'm willing to participate in this ecosystem that you're telling me about, Deb. But you know what? I still got to go into the office every time I want to get an objective measure of how I'm doing. That's not going to work. And so we felt strongly that there should be a company, and we are it now at Evidation, that allowed us to be free of this, that allowed the system to measure outcomes in a more 24/7 kind of way. And so we began to think about, like, well, okay, what are you going to need to do that? So realize that the data used to measure health outcomes for the 50 years of evidence-based medicine that I mentioned is really the visible data to the system. It's contained in the system. It's now your electronic health record. It's— for most of the last 50 years, it's been contained in manila folders on a shelf. And, in fact, you know, I've been in healthcare offices and primary care physician clinics all over the country in different— these different roles that I've had over the years. And it's not that long ago that I have been in urban areas, urban area primary care offices that are littered still with file cabinets of folders because they still have not been able to invest to upgrade their infrastructure into the digital age. So this is still real out there for many, many, many patients and many systems. It's getting better, but it's still real for me. But nonetheless, if you think about how data has been viewed, it's been viewed episodically and it's been viewed statically. Right. So you go to your primary care— you guys probably don't go to your primary care physician that much because you're not old enough, but when you get my age, you're supposed to go to your primary care physician a certain number of times a year. When you're there, they're going to do all these measurements, it's going to go on your record. Even if you have had a specific, you know, a really serious procedure, let's say that you got an implant, you're still on a 30, 60, 90-day cycle of outcome measurement, then you go to 6 months, then you go to a year, then you go a couple of times a year from then on out. It's still very episodic and static. And yet, what we've known for many years in healthcare is that it's the billion, gazillion little choices that we make every day that disproportionately affect those outcomes, right? We know that. This is not news. We did not invent this idea. Epidemiologists have known about this forever. But it kind of didn't matter, because if you couldn't measure it and it was invisible and there was no constant signal you could use to anchor around, It didn't matter that that was what we knew. We couldn't really do anything about it. And so we felt strongly that the ubiquity of mobile in the digital age and the ubiquity of wearables, of both consumer and clinical-grade APIs, by the way, really allow us to redefine the way we think about this. And there should be a company that operates in this sort of invisible data world, a previously invisible data world. And so what you're looking at is a slide from my investor deck. So this is real. And this is the way we see the data universe in healthcare. And we think about it in 2 hemispheres. There's the system-generated hemisphere on the left, which are these very large, very messy, big datasets. And then there's the individually generated datasets on the right. These are things that we are wearing. These are things that we are reporting. These are interactions with our technology. But by and large, you're going from a world on the left of large, episodic, static things to continuously flowing pan-frequency, 24/7, passively collectible things on the right. Now, from a technology standpoint, it's very hard on the left because the electronic data is messy, but it's not constantly flowing, so it's not a streaming problem. Problem on the right, from a technology standpoint, is you're dealing with extremely large pan-frequency datasets that are continuously flowing all the time, and that is a hard problem. And so, what you've seen happen in the sort of digital health ecosystem, naturally, is most companies that are platform companies or data platform companies are on the left. Why? Because that's the easiest place to go and where the lowest-hanging fruit is, right? My gosh, we needed EHR systems. Okay, there were a ton of those, you know, that propagated throughout the ecosystem over the last 15, 20 years. Now, we're all the way down. If you look at sort of 7 o'clock, now we have great, You know, a conglomeration of consumer genomics companies. Basically, we are refining really raw, messy wearables data for next-generation research in the US.