Manav Sevak, co-founder and CEO of Memora Health, on VatorNews podcast

Memora Health uses AI to digitize and automate complex care workflows

Steven Loeb and Bambi Francisco Roizen speak with Manav Sevak, co-founder and CEO of Memora Health, a company using artificial intelligence to digitize and automate complex care workflows.

Our goal is to understand tech breakthroughs radically changing healthcare: the way we screen, diagnose and treat conditions and measure outcomes. And whether tech is helping or hurting our well-being physically and mentally.

Highlights from the interview:

• There’s a trend of healthcare starting to move more and more outside the walls of traditional clinical settings, and there's a premium starting to be put on how patients are managed in the home. There is still not great infrastructure in most of those settings to support patients that way, so a lot of the core technology stack is grounded in electronic health record systems, which have been designed to manage patients when they're directly in front a clinician. After they leave, a lot of the burden of managing those patients has been taken on by the clinicians, and Memora is built to play the role of the infrastructure that helps those care teams actually manage and support those patients.
• Every single care team tries to make sure that every patient gets some form of high touch care that is meaningful and engaging and personalized to that patient but, realistically, they just don't have the bandwidth to do it. And there aren't great technology tools that empower them or supercharge them to make sure that the limited time that they have is actually meaningful, top of license, and focused on core concerns that that patient has. Memora helps overcome that barrier by taking those manual steps off of those care team’s plate and surfacing data in an actionable way so that when they  call that patient, all the background information that they need is already in front of them and that phone call is significantly more meaningful.
• The populations that Memora is most valuable to are usually the complex patients where’s a significant amount of work that they have to learn how to do in a very short period of time. It's very resource intensive, not just for the patient, but also for the care team. That inccludes patients newly diagnosed with cancer and starting a chemotherapy regimen, or new moms who have just delivered and are going home as a primary caregiver for the first time, or patients with multiple chronic conditions.
• Memoria interfaces with the medical record to make sure that when patients receives certain information and reminders that it's are specific to their problem list. The company has an entire clinical team in-house care delivery function that designs and maintains these different programs in 26 different clinical areas. That includes educational information around specific diagnoses that Memora writes, and then sends out on a set schedule for different types of patients, such as different symptom triage guidelines and different commonly asked questions. 
• The company wants to spend more time in primary care, an area that accounts for a significant amount of revenue inside of health systems, so it has a really, really large population of patients that Memora can help impact and manage a lot more effectively. Others are neurology, bariatric surgery, endocrinology, and pulmonology. There are also populations that Sevak doesn’t believe would be a good fit where the patient is either critical enough, or struggling with something that is serious enough, where it just requires a human touch from a care team. That includes patients struggling with behavioral health challenges, and patients that are dealing with palliative care, where having some human touch throughout the entirety of the process is incredibly valuable.
• Memora used to work a lot with independent practices and individual physicians but, in reality, to deliver a very personalized engagement to a patient, it requires some customization for those sites and every single clinician has a slightly different workflow. Giving them the ability to customize that and having Memora's team work closely with them and give them guidance on what will and will not work has been really, really valuable. Memora has programs that are out of the box and it has worked with a handful of medical groups and digital health companies that are implementing those but it's not as if you can just create an account online, download the program yourself, and implement it and that's entirely intentional.
• Memoria takes a lot of pride in the outcomes that it helps drive and it also takes a lot of pride in being a very outcomes driven company. As a result, in the long term, the company will be paid on a value-based system. There always probably will be a small component that is a SaaS fee, because there's core maintenance of a software platform that Memora incurs, but the future is moving towards more value-based pricing.

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