Here’s the transcript from the podcast I did with Lonny Reisman, a week or so back. Really interesting stuff for those of you interested in the future of patient care management.
Matthew Holt: So welcome to another forecast here at The Health Care Blog. I’m Matthew Holt, and today very exciting that we’re talking with somebody’s who’s really been a technology pioneer and a medical pioneer in developing tools for active health management, and surprising enough, his company is called Active Health Management and I’m talking with Lonny Reisman. Lonny, how are you today?
Lonny Reisman: I’m well, thank you. How are you?
Matthew: We’re doing pretty well over here. One of the first fall and somewhat foggy days in San Francisco, but at least we’re not going to endure that terrible New York winter you’re going to have to go through [laughter]. Anyway, let me very briefly give a sense to, in essence, what your organization does. And there are a couple of things that people who may or may not necessarily have heard of Active Health Management should know. First off is that you are in the business of taking data, all kinds of different data about medical information about patients, putting it all together and spitting it back out and using it to try and help and inform and change medical decisions by those patients and physicians. And the second one is that you’ve been so successful at that, that last year, Aetna decided to write a very big check, $400 million to buy you, and now you’re part of that large insurance company. So with that it’s a very brief introduction. why don’t you say a little bit about what Active Health Management does, how you got started, and what kind of impact you’ve been having in the healthcare system and the part of it you’re specializing in.
Lonny: Sure. Why don’t I start with my background, which will give you a sense of how we have come to be here. I’m board-certified in internal medicine in cardiology, I’m a physician, and during the 1990s I was leading a bit of a dual existence. I was practicing clinical medicine here in New York City, had a fairly typical practice, but I also was consulting with a large human resources consulting firm, William M Mercer, and was charged with evaluating health plans around the United States, mostly from my perspective on the basis of quality but obviously the premiums and the costs associated for those health plans was a consideration as well. In considering what I was experiencing as a practitioner and what I saw as a consultant evaluating health plans, saw an opportunity to better take advantage of clinical data that were available in the managed care world which weren’t being fully exploited. So specifically as I visited health plans I saw that they had the capacity to collect drug information, laboratory results, information about procedures and diagnoses and basically had the thought that if in fact that information could be used to support doctors and patients in making decisions, that in fact we’d be able to raise the bar with regard to the level of clinical excellence being provided to patients all over the United States. So fundamentally, the observation that I made, which ended up being relevant to what I was experiencing as a practitioner was that to the extend that the care that was being provided by me and others was fragmented, specifically I didn’t necessarily know what other doctors were doing to my patients or for my patients, to the extent that all of the information about a patient or much of it could be aggregated at the health plan level, we decided to take advantage of that.
The other component of Active Health, which again sort of derives from my own experience and perhaps insecurity, is that I recognized early on in my career that it’s very, very difficult to keep up. So there are thousands of articles, relevant articles, published yearly and the issue is how does one not only read and assimilate and remember those articles, but how does a physician relate the information in an article that they’ve read to the particulars that relate to a patient sitting in front of that doctor during the course of an office visit.
Matthew: They can’t is basically the answer, correct?
Lonny: Can’t do it, right, exactly. It’s just too much. So the basic notion and this is as true today as it was in 1998 when we started the company was if in fact you could provide the treating physician with more clinical data on the member than they have access to—again the patients frequently see multiple doctors—and then if you could expose those data to thousands of clinical rules that represent incontrovertible standards of clinical excellence and use technology to highlight discrepancies between what was actually happening to the patient as manifested in their data as opposed to what should be happening as displayed in the literature, we in fact could pinpoint changes that needed to be applied to individual patients by doctors that related to everything from preventive care to diagnostic services to therapeutics to follow-up, and basically started the company with the notion that we would have those data, have a technology that would analyze those data and communicate first with doctors and then over the years with patients in order to again introduce this level of consistency to the healthcare system. And from there we’ve evolved into other sort of disease management like capabilities which I’ll elaborate on. But the fundamental premise behind the company is what I’ve articulated.
