Dr. Archana Dubey, Chief Medical Officer at UHC, on Meet the Corporate Innovator podcast

We speak to influencers inside large corporations to understand their priorities and goals

On Meet the Corporate Innovator podcast, Ranjit Padmanabhan, co-founder and CTO at Autonom8 and guest host of this podcast, talks with Dr. Archana Dubey, Chief Medical Officer at UnitedHealthcare.

In this podcast we speak to influencers and decision makers inside large corporations to understand their priorities and goals, but we'll also spend a lot of time having a discussion about the big innovation gaps in their industry, and how technology has either helped or hurt efforts to improve products and services while reducing waste. We'll ask them about their challenges, the solutions they're seeking, and their strategic mandate. Think of my conversation as a reverse pitch: startup founders can hear from these influencers and better understand how to engage with them and how to approach them.

The Meet the Corporate Innovator podcast is brought to you by Excelerate, a global club of executives and decision makers who help startups succeed. 

Highlights from the call:

• Dubey has been a practicing physician for the last 25 years and her focus has been on making her patient’s life better and making them the 100 person version of themselves. She was doing one patient at a time, so she pivoted to scale her ability to treat several thousand people by helping large employers make sense of how to utilize solutions and their health plans to better serve their population of employees and their dependents
• Member engagement is a huge learning for most employers, as they are trying to create an alternate universe of health and well being that exists in parallel to already existing hospitals and health plans. Because employers are caring for the employees, their health benefits, and they are paying for it, if the health plans or the provider groups and hospitals don't move or innovate fast enough, the employers get a little bit impatient and they want to consider solutions that will drive health and well being faster for their members. 
• We are in the midst of a digital health revolution, and we are still in version 1.0. Dubey's advice for the individuals is, as they're building their digital health solution, they should work with a friendly employer, or the buyer of that solution, so that they can provide deep insights into the incentives of a partnership, whether it’s getting into a pilot scenario or working with a champion partner who's willing to give insights into the product team. It's really critical to find the champion, talk to them at a regular cadence, and then see how you can solve the pain points. Chances are that the employer is not unique, and the needs of that employer or the health plan are very common across the industry
• Mental health and behavioral health are not a new problem, they existed before but we didn't have solutions, we didn't have a conversation, and we never democratized it. But it has been an underlying cause for either rising healthcare costs or declining health problems. For example, most diabetics have depression. It is well known, well documented in clinical literature, but it has never surfaced before. We are having a conversation now because it is coming to a head. So, this is the number one concern across the board
• Telehealth has impacted the access to care in a very meaningful way, and it has fundamentally changed interactions so they are digital first, and in-person second. That is something that most every physician group, health system, hospital, was trying to do for years, but COVID accelerated that growth and it's a positive thing.
• The digital health revolution has fragmented care. Care used to be you had one doctor who knew everything about you, your resources, which pharmacy you're going to, what insurance you have, what kinds of services you could obtain and use. The one quarterback for you. Now, you have that doctor, but then you have Livongo, a musculoskeletal solution, a behavioral health solution, and that clinician has no insight into what other tools and solutions that the patient is using. That is creating a fragmented patient and doctor experience. So, you're unable to quantify the impact of these interventions in a meaningful way and then also coordinate between these so that you can have a more augmented outcome, rather than having that fragmented outcome.