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Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
Agentic Healthcare and Building AI Advocates to Navigate Healthcare with Eric Marton
00:18:50
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- [00:00]
A
This is Scott Becker with the Becker's Healthcare podcast. I am thrilled today to be joined by a brilliant healthcare founder. We're joined today by Eric Martin and Eric's the founder and the CEO of Agentic Healthcare. He's going to talk to us about what they're doing, what they're trying to solve, the trends he's watching and a lot more. Eric, I know you've had a spectacular career. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, your background as well as Agentic healthcare?
- [00:30]
B
Yeah. Thank you so much, Scott. Really appreciate you having me on and appreciate all of the folks that are tuning in. So I am a lifetime healthcare guy spanning large academic health systems, large physician organizations, private equity backed health care companies, and I've been a part of two different health tech venture capital funds. I will tell you that I was a very happy health tech venture capitalist and I thought I would be doing that for the rest of my professional life. But this opportunity emerged and I think there are these moments in time where we kind of get the chills professionally and this was one of those times and I couldn't not step in and take advantage of the opportunity. So I'll give you a little bit of that background. But first I will say that during the course of my professional career, I would say the most important work that I've done is being kind of the unofficial healthcare navigator concierge for thousands and thousands of patients and families. Whether I was doing that on behalf of some provider organization or simply as a private resource for people that had access to me, I really came to appreciate the unbelievable complexity and fragmentation and often frustration of dealing with the US health care system. And that's very much kind of the backdrop for what we are doing at Agentic Healthcare. So a little bit about us. Let's just say we're a very unusual startup company. We have been quietly building some pretty serious deep tech and acquiring the assets of other companies over the course of the last 18 months. It all started back with a meeting I was having up at Nvidia headquarters and I had the pleasure. And I will tell you, this is close to 18 months ago. I hardly knew what the word agentic meant meant at that time. Nvidia gave me a little bit of a behind the scenes of what they were investing in and what was possible in the realm of building AI agents that would support enterprise players in healthcare health systems, physician organizations, health insurance companies and the like driving efficiency, dealing with labor gaps. And I do believe truly hoping to improve the patient experience. And in that session we had together, we asked the question, what would it take to bring that same level of AI power and put that into the hands of patients and families, let them optimize the system to their benefit, kind of put a wrapper around all the component parts that make up the US Healthcare system and create an army of agents that could represent those patients, get work done on their behalf, not just provide recommendations, but actually do the work, wait on hold for that representative at the health plan, help navigate to the appropriate specialist and the like. And let's just say that the group was excited about that vision, understood the complexity, the challenges and the like. Over the course of time, the group of people and organizations that we were engaging in this conversation grew to include people from government, people from deep tech, and of course, across the healthcare ecosystem. And last year, we decided to incorporate agentic healthcare. We brought a very large engineering team together and again, we made some acquisitions that make us quickly a vertically integrated organization.
- [04:31]
A
That's amazing. And just so the audience understands, yes, you've been a healthcare investor, but more than that, you've also worked at UCLA and several other healthcare institutions in direct and in surgery partners as well. Talk a bit about your healthcare background too. That weaves into what you're doing too.
- [04:51]
B
Absolutely. Happy to do that. So it goes back quite a long way. I cut my teeth up at UC San Francisco actually in the managed care department and really came to appreciate the good and the bad of managed care and value based care initiatives here in California where I'm based. Learned an incredible amount and then spent a lot of time on the UCLA health campus again, more work in managed care, international medicine and the like, and then eventually moved over to the cardiovascular program and had the great pleasure of working with what we referred to as the Advanced Heart Team. So we ran the heart transplant, heart failure, mechanical circulatory support program, and we had a vision for building what would be the greatest heart institute in the western United States. Not to offend any of my friends at ucla, and I still have many friends there. For whatever reason, that vision was not able to be realized on that campus. But I was able to partner with my friends at Cedars Sinai and build the heart Institute there. I was the inaugural executive director of the Heart Institute at Cedars Sinai and they are now among the top two or three in the nation and very proud of the work that's done there clinically in the research realm, and of course the teaching mission being supported as well, and really jumped from there and into the private equity world to help turn around other healthcare systems, including the Daughters of Charity and others, and saw kind of the other side of medicine. I had been in the ivory tower academic institutions, and now I was seeing what it was like out in community hospitals, safety net hospitals, FQHCs, you know, a very different type of care delivery. Critically important work. But I think it gave me a really deep appreciation for the very different journeys that our patients and their families go on across systems, across geographies, across the socioeconomic spectrum. And when we started building agentic healthcare, a guiding principle for the team has been that this must work just as well for the rich folk that have access to enormous resources as much as it does for that single mom living in a poor neighborhood, facing more complexity and more challenge than most of us having this conversation have ever had to tackle. And we're incredibly proud of the work we've done so far, and I will say publicly, long term, we are committed to making sure this is available to every single American. And it's something that we're working on with our friends connected to government as well.
- [07:50]
A
Thank you. Take a moment. Eric, what are you most focused on and excited about this year? A year or so or 18 months after launch, where are you most focused and excited this year?
- [08:02]
B
Yeah, you know, I will tell you that, you know, we're just so proud of the team of people and organizations that have come together around this, our ability to accelerate the development of this platform. We've been, we were in this kind of euphoric bubble of stealth mode where most people didn't know what was going on. And Scott, I will tell you, this is the first time we're really speaking to a broad public audience about what we're doing. And the timing is perfect because we are in fact about to kick off with a large publicly traded company who will be giving this platform to their employees as a benefit. And not only is it a benefit to those individuals and their families, but you can imagine the, and I will say, appropriate insights that we can provide back to the organization to help them with plan design, benefit design, really drive efficiency and create a workforce that's more engaged, healthier, and I think cared for in a way that they haven't been before. So incredibly excited about that. I think we're very fortunate that the stars are aligning from a policy standpoint, from what we're seeing from other kind of big tech companies in putting a spotlight on consumer driven healthcare. We've talked about it for many, many, many, many years. I think there have been small examples of success here and there, but it's never come together. We've never had the technology at our disposal to really do this at scale. And I think we're finally there.
- [09:53]
A
Thank you. Take a second. Eric, you've been both an investor, but you've also been an operator in healthcare and a leader in healthcare. What advice would you give to emerging leaders in health care as to how to deal with artificial intelligence and how to embrace it?
- [10:09]
B
Fantastic question and something I've been spending my time speaking about really across the country with health system leaders, health plan leaders and the like. First and foremost, you got to keep the patient experience at the center of strategic decision. I think some of us, me included, had the luxury of having that be somewhat secondary as we tried to make sure that we improved margin and kept the doors open and made sure that our programs could continue to build and whatnot. And we counted on the frontline teams, the physicians, the nurses, the administrative folks, to really deliver great patient care down at the front lines. I think now we really have to think about from an infrastructure standpoint how we change what we do. And a part of that requires leaders, again, provider and payer, to challenge some legacy assumptions that were developed during this pre AI era. I have been, I guess, not surprised, but I'm a little fearful of what I'm seeing around the country, folks not fully appreciating what's coming. The power of these AI technologies is so transformational. I just don't think that many organizations are fully prepared and you know, I beg these folks to make the investment, bring the right people and organizations together as partners, embrace those partnerships. And some of those partners are going to seem maybe a little bit out of the box based on what we used to do historically operating these health systems. But you've got to become educated and you have to bring people and organizations in who are focused on delivering the kinds of outcomes that are going to set up your health system or your health plan for long term success. I think those that don't are going to be in some trouble.
- [12:17]
A
Thank you. And what is that look like? Where do you see the cascading use cases in AI? Obviously we're seeing it on the ambient listening side. We're seeing it on predictive analytics. We're seeing in revenue cycle. We're seeing it a lot of places. Are there places where you see it transforming clinical care and where might be some of those use cases that you expect to see?
- [12:44]
B
Absolutely. And you've highlighted the first and maybe most obvious use cases that have been embraced. We already have some good Feedback from the industry on ambient listening and what that means. Certainly rcm, always the first department to take advantage of new tech because it's the lifeblood of these organizations. There is going to be a growing, I think, recognition of what happened kind of in between the enterprise representing AI and the consumer representing AI. And there is a certain amount of magic that can happen when those two platforms interact with each other in a coordinated, in a fine tuned fashion. I'll give you an example. I can't provide too many details, but we were speaking with a particular, you know, government health program and we talked about what it meant for a patient representing AI agent to reach out with a request, whether that was to schedule an appointment, a question about benefits, to find out how they can get their prescribed medication approved or whatnot, and if the enterprise, that program had appropriate kind of AI on the other side, not only can the task get taken care of very, very quickly, I think there's a lot of talk about in the tech world what we refer to as AI agent to AI agent protocol, that when these AI agents meet in the cloud, they will understand each other and be very, very efficient in healthcare. We're taking it a step further and this is a part of what we're building our platform around. And that is when, let's say Ms. Jones reaches out to her health system and the health system says, oh, we understand in a moment that Ms. Jones needs to have something taken care of. But that's the same Ms. Jones who we've been reaching out to to talk about her medication adherence, the fact that she's got an overdue colonoscopy, the fact that maybe she's got an outstanding claim and there's an opportunity in this moment when you have these AI representatives, what we refer to by the way as AI advocate representing that patient, that information can be passed from the enterprise to the patient in a way that can be translated, organized, presented at the right time, at a time when we know that patient is engaged. And the value that can be driven through that kind of interaction is incredibly powerful. We've been testing this again somewhat quietly behind the scenes with small cohorts and the feedback has just been remarkable on both sides of the house. So to answer your question more directly, these institutions need to move beyond kind of the individual functions of ambient listening and some RCM solutions and really start looking about being a participant in, in this, what I refer to as this action layer that is now going to kind of wrap the legacy system that we've historically been interacting with as health System leaders as health plan leaders, as employers and the like.
- [16:12]
A
Fantastic, Eric, again, Agentic Healthcare, tell me the exact name of the company. Do I have that right?
- [16:18]
B
Agentic Healthcare, you have said it perfectly. And again, we're a little bit of an unusual young company. Agentic Healthcare is the parent organization we created. The patient representing AI agent platform is actually called Teleport Health and that is what we are initially launching with a series of large employers. And ultimately we'll get this out to all consumers. And then we've made acquisition of two other companies, one called Selfie, one called TripleBlind. Selfie actually has technology that lives behind the firewalls of many of the health information exchanges in the United States and is the creator of the Cures Gateway, Named after the 21st Century Cures act, giving patients the right to claim their longitudinal health record. And you can imagine if we have the ability to bring in the longitudinal health record for every one of our members, for every one of our patients, the ability for the AI advocate to be proactive, to optimize things on behalf of the patient is supercharged. So we were really excited to be able to make that acquisition. And then tripleblind, I won't spend too much time on It's a deep tech encryption technology that provides privacy beyond hipaa. It allows for multi party compute without the need for traditional de identification, with greater privacy, greater security than seen before and some very large institutions and the US government had been involved in its development. So again, we were just incredibly fortunate to be in a position to bring those assets into Agentic Healthcare, creating this vertical integration and getting us ready to do what we do at scale and do it in a safe fashion.
- [18:16]
A
Absolutely fascinating. Eric, I want to thank you for joining us today on the Beckers Healthcare podcast. Congratulations on what you're doing and continue. Good luck. And we're all sort of watching the cascading transformation of healthcare through AI and so it'll be fascinating to watch and keep an eye on. Thank you so much for joining us.
- [18:35]
B
Thank you so much Scott. And really looking forward to interacting more with you. And all of you, the folks that I know listen to your podcast, those are the partners that are going to make this happen.
- [18:45]
A
Thank you so much.