H1 aggregates healthcare data to identify and connect the most relevant healthcare professionals
Steven Loeb and Bambi Francisco Roizen speak with Ariel Katz, co-founder and CEO of H1, a company that aggregates healthcare data together, allowing patients, insurance companies, healthcare organizations, pharmaceutical, and biotech companies, to identify and connect with the most relevant healthcare professionals.
Our overall goal is to understand how technology is radically changing healthcare: the way we screentreat and measure progress and outcomes. How we’re empowering the consumer. Whether we’re creating productivity that drives economic costs down? And how tech advancements change the role of the doctor.
Highlights from the interview:
- Katz’s first company was a platform that helped connect students to the right faculty mentor to get their PhD program, which was sold to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Through that experience he learned about how medical research was funded and decided to build H1 as a LinkedIn meets ZoomInfo for doctors. The idea was to have everything you'd ever want to know about every doctor in the world kept up to date, and given to doctors, insurance companies, pharma companies, and patients.
- H1 helps pharma companies find doctors that could recruit patients to a clinical trial that have a diverse patient population. Pharma companies want the people that are in a clinical trial to be representative of the people that have the disease, and H1 helps them find the doctors that are seeing those types of patients. It also helps medical device companies find the right doctors that run specific procedures.
- The company separates out data, which is a raw electronic medical record entered by a doctor; information, which is putting some user interface on top of it, packaging it together and giving some representation so it’s easier to digest; and insights, which says, “this doctor sees 15% more patients than the doctor next door and the patients that this doctor sees have better patient outcomes than the doctor next door.” It puts insights on top of the information which is sitting on top of the data. The issue in healthcare is not access to data, the real issue is the transformation to information and insights, which doesn't exist.
- The company gets its data through both public sources, including hospital websites, as well as information posted by government, as well as from private sources, including information from insurance companies from electronic medical records, and through partnerships with governments around the world, like CMS. The US government has been innovating like crazy in healthcare, starting during the Obama administration but the European government is particularly difficult to work with.
- CMS has scores called HEDIS, which rate a hospital and doctors for how well they perform. That's data that's not available outside the US. Understanding what patients think is fine but what everyone really wants to know is, how good is this doctor at treating a condition?
- Healthcare organizations use H1’s faculty opinions product to understand what doctors think about the latest science medicine, and also to drive successful referrals to their hospital health systems. Hospitals have teams that go and educate primary care physicians about the skills and expertise of that hospital and they usually want to know who are the physicians in the community that see patient populations that they want to drive to the hospital.
- Katz believes that decentralized clinical trials are hyped up and are a tiny percentage that only work for certain conditions. He believes in remote patient monitoring using technology integrated into trials and integrated into hospitals, but not a fully remote decentralized clinical trial. It was very buzzword during COVID because people would not go into a hospital for their clinical trials.
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Steven Loeb
