For the past 25+ years, my career has been wholly dedicated to fixing problems in healthcare. I was bitten by the “healthcare is broken” bug all the way back in college. In my first Public Health course, I learned how foundational healthcare is to societal functioning and advancement. As an earnest Social Welfare major, I wanted to make the world a better place and felt strongly that there was SO much we could do to improve our healthcare system.
At some point in this two and a half decades of work and study, my focus homed in on fixing how we pay for healthcare as the foundational, necessary step to fixing so much else of what ails our system. I also found my way to product management about halfway through this journey. This has proven to be the ideal way for me to make an impact in a setting that is complementary to how I work best. I love working in fast-paced environments, seeing tangible results, and creating scalable solutions via technology.
Our Technology
My career has traversed many different aspects of how healthcare gets paid for: hospital revenue cycle, pharmaceutical reimbursement, value-based care (part 1), direct primary care, and value-based care (part 2). I have been working in the “guts” of healthcare for long enough that I have acquired a lot of institutional knowledge about how things work (and how they don’t). I have plenty of dreams of how I want healthcare to be, juxtaposed with a deep understanding of this big, messy system.
As I have watched new technologies heralded as the silver bullet for all that ails healthcare over the years, I have felt a little skeptical. Great technology also needs to be paired with policy and cultural change, which is one of the reasons I have been drawn to building in value-based care.
Enter this current era of Artificial Intelligence. A few years ago, I viewed the new advancements in AI with the same skepticism. I could see the potential, but how could it be *the* solution? Who would pay for it? Would it only benefit those who could afford the expensive solutions being sold?
Today, the more I learn about AI, and the more it advances, the more excited I am becoming. AI is within striking distance of solving some of the most intractable problems in healthcare that are holding up so much needed change— lack of true healthcare interoperability, staffing shortages, provider burnout, data overload, and many more. And maybe, AI can be the catalyst for the change we need in healthcare.
-
What if EMRs could talk to each other through agents like humans, acting like translators from countries that speak different languages? Think of how much more we could do with our technology if this were true, and how much more smoothly healthcare could operate overall.
-
What if a patient could access what they need at all times, without waiting for that precious appointment slot to open? Think of how many bad events could be avoided, and many more patients could receive care.
-
What if a physician’s day could look radically different, with actual time to spend with the patients who need them for more than 15 minutes? Think of how many more people might want to devote themselves to this profession, without the moral injury our current system yields.
-
What if a consumer could choose to buy an affordable AI-first health plan? Think of how many more people could access healthcare coverage.
AI has more potential than anything I’ve seen in the past 25 years to be the accelerant towards clinical, social, and financial transformation in healthcare. Over the last few months in particular, I’ve been feeling a little bit more like that earnest Social Welfare major again—I have hope that we can enact real change. The difference this time is that I have the tools, the team, and the technology to make those changes happen, because of Pearl. The value-based payment models we operate within require us to think beyond the status quo of care delivery to achieve the best patient and financial outcomes.
There couldn’t be a better forum within which to innovate using the new tools available than our work Pearl. My Product, Engineering, Data Science, and Experience Design colleagues have some big things coming—stay tuned!
How much more could your practice earn with Pearl?
Try out Pearl’s Value-Based Care Advisor tool to find out how much your practice could earn with ACO REACH.
See what VBC could mean for your practice, in practice.
Share a few key details with us to receive a personalized, data-driven analysis tailored to your specific practice.
See what VBC could mean for your practice, in practice.
Share a few key details with us to receive a personalized, data-driven analysis tailored to your specific practice.
