Healthcare Unbound_Neechi Mosha: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Intro:
Welcome to Healthcare Unbound, a podcast powered by Clarify Health, where healthcare's changemakers discuss ways to advance care outcomes, cost, and affordability.
Saul Marquez:
Hey everybody! Welcome back to the Healthcare Unbound podcast recording live at HLTH 2023 here in Las Vegas. Today, I have the pleasure of having Dr. Neechi Mosha with us. He is a Senior Vice President and General Manager of Provider and Insights at Clarify. In this role, he owns the commercial growth of Clarify software and data products to provider organizations. He's passionate about effective utilization of technology to improve outcomes in healthcare, and that's what we're here to talk about. Neechi, thanks for joining us today.
Neechi Mosha:
Thanks for having me.
Saul Marquez:
Absolutely. Just really to kick things off, I'd love to ask, what got you started in healthcare innovation?
Neechi Mosha:
You know, it's actually a fairly short answer, which is that I'm very impatient. And that's the short answer, And I'll tell you the longer answer as to what that means. I got my start back in medicine. I went to medical school, and my intent was always to go and be a cardiothoracic surgeon, and I always wanted to do research on the side because I wanted, my goal is to figure out how do we improve the healthcare system. And academic research was kind of the way that I was told that you do that as you go, and you figure out your research plans, and you go design those and go run them for years and years, and then you kind of see the outcomes, and hopefully, it works, and then you deploy some new model. And the side, I always loved technology growing up, and I loved the pace at which technology moved in my consumer life. I loved trying out new gadgets, all that great stuff. And I was kind of just like, why doesn't this happen in healthcare? And finally, it kind of clicked because I started seeing all these digital health companies, and I realized, aha, I'm an impatient person. Academic research just wasn't the path for me. It's a great path, and it obviously leads to a tremendous outcomes for care delivery, patient care, therapeutics that come out. But at the end of the day, I really wanted to be at a cycle that was a lot shorter, and I saw that through the technology and through healthcare innovation from this lens. And I was kind of where I said, you know what, my personality profile, I need to go be on this side and go try new things and see how they work more on a quicker timescale. And that's what we try and do, try and do things, and obviously, you think it through to the best of your abilities, but try and deploy it quickly and see what the effects are.
Saul Marquez:
That's fantastic, Neechi. Thank you for that. And yeah, you stuck with your love for medicine, just found a different angle to get quicker results.
Neechi Mosha:
Exactly, or at least try to.
Saul Marquez:
At least try to.
Neechi Mosha:
That's right, that's right.
Saul Marquez:
And so, what's the most unique way the organization you work at Clarify adds value to health systems and patients?
Neechi Mosha:
Yeah, I think the easiest way that I, when we're talking to health systems and the folks that we're dealing with, is we cut through the noise for them. And so it literally just came off a conversation with someone who was saying they spent months digging through claims data to try and figure out which of their providers were treating patients in this in the optimal way, who was providing appropriate care, who was really providing the types of care that will lead to lower readmission rates, lower length of stay, ideally higher quality. And they spent months going through this claims data to get at the insights that our platform can show you in seconds. And that conversation kind of summarized it for me where it's like, man, I could do that for you, and like, I could deploy that for you right now. And so I think that's the value, is cutting through the noise quickly, helping them get to the answers they need, as opposed to figuring out all the different ways they could try and approach the problem and cut through the data and slice and dice things. We try and make that as seamless as possible. And so I think it ends up saving them time and ultimately allows them to get to the solutions that hopefully help them deliver better care down the line.
Saul Marquez:
That's awesome. Now, thank you for that. And it's certainly a promising way to do that, to go from months to minutes, hours.
Neechi Mosha:
Yeah, I mean, we do okay. We have to train them on the platform. So give us two, three weeks here to go through some configuration onboarding. But once you're in there, you're in there, and you're not digging in through like weirdly formatted fields and having to sift through all that noise, then call your data analyst and have them come wrap their heads around things. Like you're getting to the answers a lot, lot quicker.
Saul Marquez:
That's awesome. Thank you for that. And what's an emerging trend area in healthcare technology that's exciting to you?
Neechi Mosha:
That is a tough question. There's a lot out there, and you can see it if you just walk into the exhibit hall next door, there's so many folks out there. I'd say one that personally excites me is I think the world has showed us time and time again it's not a fair place to be. And I think the startups and companies that are going after, how do we make care delivery more equitable? How do we increase access for certain patient populations? I've started to see more and more startups that are thinking about, how do you go after this kind of subpopulations that don't get the same access to care that many of us do receive, whether it be specific groups like LGBTQ populations that need certain types of care and aren't getting them effectively, or I think I saw one that was focused on prison population getting the care that they need. And so I really think that's a really cool area. I don't know, candidly, like commercially, like, are these going to be super viable businesses, and will they be successful? I really hope they are, because there's just so many pockets of our communities and our world that need access to more and better care, and more differentiated care, and more personalized. And so those are really exciting to me personally, but there's a lot out there.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah, for sure. No thanks. Neechi. And it's this access and equity, the importance of those things is certainly near and dear to my heart as well. And I, too, am in these companies' corners, hoping that they can succeed.
Neechi Mosha:
I hope so.
Saul Marquez:
If you could get your hands on any dataset, what would it be?
Neechi Mosha:
Oh man, I would have probably said a couple of years ago, maybe Donald Trump's tax records or something. Any data set? I'm going to cheat on this one, okay? And tell you the real data set, I think, which is what Clarify has been trying to build, and we've not gotten there, and want us to get there as quickly as possible, because I told you, I'm impatient, is the holy grail of having all the EMR data that all health systems are producing, all the claims data coming out of payers, have it all in one place, all linked together, and just have that holy grail complete data set. It's not one piece of data, it's not one data set, it's many, many, many data sets from very disparate places, but combining them into one place and then really throwing our problems at that to say, hey, we have 100% coverage of all the care that's being delivered. We know everything. Now let's figure out within that. What are the bits of information we need so that we can start delivering better care within that? That would be the Holy Grail because we face challenges getting the data that we need to inform things the way that we want them, so that we have the right accuracy. And Clarify has done an amazing job. We've amassed 300 million lives worth of data. However, we don't have every bit of information on every patient, and as we get more and more of those data points, our insights get more inaccurate and get more precise to allow you to make different decisions.
Saul Marquez:
That's great, yeah. Hey, listen, let's be hopeful of that. Interoperability continues to be a challenge, but I think there's improvement. To your point, it's slow but impressive what Clarify has been able to achieve thus far with what is available. What role does Clarify play in improving the patient journey?
Neechi Mosha:
Yeah, it's an excellent question because, you know, it's not like we directly work with patients or with consumers of healthcare. Really, our tools are targeted towards the administrators, the analysts, the executives that are making decisions that ultimately do impact the patient journey. So I think a couple of ways that I'd say we do impact that patient journey more directly is one, identifying the best providers to be treating the specific, kind of going back to my point about subpopulations, different providers are going to be better or worse at treating certain types of patients because they see them more, because they have an academic interest, because they do some research around that thing. So identifying through our precise analytics, where providers have spikes in terms of their ability to deliver the peak care, that's where we start to impact the patient journey, because we're able to to more closely link the right provider with the right patient and get their journeys to be smoother and more efficient, more effective, and ultimately deliver better care to them. That's one big one. The other is really we started mapping out patient journeys across a variety of therapeutic areas, disease areas, and started mapping, well, what are all of the events that typically take place in a patient's journey of a certain type? So think of breast cancer patients and all the events that they go through during the course of what can be a very lengthy diagnosis. We try and map that out so that we can then smooth that out to say, hey, rather than this person having to go get their mammogram done 30 miles away, how do we make sure that there are services for them near, or how do we get them connected to something nearer to them? And so mapping those patient journeys and trying to help the health systems figure out how do we smooth that journey so that the care is delivered as efficiently as possible is another way.
Saul Marquez:
I love that, Neechi. It's about that sort of care navigation that ties into the patient experience to really optimize the level of care, the timeliness of the care that you're referring to.
Neechi Mosha:
And you can't do that without having tons of data because we need to understand what are all the different. I don't know if you watch Loki by any chance, but.
Saul Marquez:
I haven't yet. I'm getting through The Mandalorian.
Neechi Mosha:
Gotcha, gotcha, Loki's all about these different branches of time continuum, and there's all these branches.
Saul Marquez:
Gotta check that out.
Neechi Mosha:
And it's kind of like that. I kind of see patient journeys as that, because there's the kind of line that you can draw across everyone's journey.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah.
Neechi Mosha:
But within that there's going to be tons of variation, right? Some people are going to maybe not have that first visit with a PCP, but they go straight to an oncologist somehow, or whatever the case may be. And so as we amass more and more data, we can start to see, well, actually, maybe this is not one big cohort, maybe it's three smaller cohorts, and we should actually map those individually as opposed to that big one and try and clump everyone into there. And so more and more data will help, but that's the goal, is to smooth those journeys and start to get better Intel on them.
Saul Marquez:
Love that. No, thank you for that, and appreciate the Loki reference there.
Neechi Mosha:
Season two just started.
Saul Marquez:
I'm going to have to dig in. I'm going to have to dig in. Look, this has been a lot of fun, Neechi. What closing thought would you leave to our listeners today?
Neechi Mosha:
Gosh, we're in the desert, so hydrate, hydrate, hydrate, hydrate. I'd say that's number one thought on my mind right now. But really, I think, going back to the piece around inequity, finding ways to close the gaps in care, finding ways to provide everyone with the access to care that we all need, and really tap that. I think that's a big part of what we can all try and strive to solve and try and make this world a more fair place, because we all should have the same opportunities.
Saul Marquez:
Love that. Great way to close today's session. Folks, there are ways for you to optimize the way that you care for patients, patient care journeys, value-based care, and I think a lot of the things that we talked about today with Dr. Neechi Mosha are an example of that. So, Neechi, thank you so much for your time today and for sharing the insights here from Las Vegas.
Neechi Mosha:
I appreciate you having me. Thank you.
Intro:
Thank you for listening to Healthcare Unbound. We hope today's episode was insightful. If you want more information on how Clarify Health can help you, please visit ClarifyHealth.com.
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