then address the social determinants, [like] Healthify and NowPow.
If you’re a health system and you have thousands of patients, you’ve got to eat the elephant one bite at a time. How do you prioritize the people that you care for and also prioritize the social needs that should be addressed that help them come back into wellness?
[Startup] Socially Determined has an interesting approach [of] trying to create an index to not just say, “60 percent of your clients have food insecurity,” but rather to say, “If you address food insecurity, we think you can improve health outcomes and reduce costs by X amount.” That puts a value proposition on addressing social determinants for the health system because it reduces re-hospitalization or unnecessary hospitalization.
X: Has healthcare lagged other industries when it comes to making cutting-edge technologies part of professionals’ daily lives? Is your view that the past 10 years have largely been about getting hospitals and clinics to implement new electronic health records systems—in part by having the government offset part of the cost of the new software—and that the next decade is when we’re likely to see people in the industry really harness those tools to improve care and lower costs?
KD: Yes and yes. We’ve been embarrassingly slow. We still, to a large degree, are just thinking about how to improve efficiencies in our supply chain, rather than really rethinking the model.
This is why what we have the chance to do in Austin [at Dell Med] is exciting. It’s also why we’re seeing a lot of “side disruption,” people might call it—the possibility that there’s going to be some significant disintermediation of the healthcare infrastructure.
This CVS-Aetna merger, as an example, is the beginning of what I think are going to be some very interesting alignments between retail and digital platform companies, like the Amazons of the world. [Those alignments] will really disrupt healthcare in a way that I think can accelerate change.
And as long as it’s done on behalf of—and to the benefit of—patients, I think we’re in great shape. We’ve just got to make sure that we’re putting them front and center.
