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Tim Stenovec
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David Gura
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Christina Raffini
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Lisa Mateo
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Tim Stenovec
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David Gura
You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Massar and Tim Stanvac on Bloomberg Radio.
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Carol Massar
The rise of AI in health care about how increasingly before we're booking doctor's appointments, we're checking with Dr. Chatgpt.
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Tim Stenovec
Yeah, I mean listen, it's safe to say you get some kind of diagnosis or you have you feeling a certain way, you're out there, you know, Googling Google Doc, Dr. Google. But you're also using AI to kind of get an understanding of like what's going on. And this is increasingly we're going to probably see this play a role in health care.
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Carol Massar
Yeah. I think the question a lot of providers are grappling with is how to integrate that technology into their health systems. And that's where the partnership between our next two guests comes in. We've got joining us on set Alan Block, co founder and CEO of K Health. He's here in the Bloomberg Interactive Broker studio. Also with us, Jeffrey Flax, president and CEO of the Hartford Health Care of Hartford Health Care, I should say. He joins us from Hartford, Connecticut. Hartford Healthcare cares for more than 26,7000 people each and every day. It's got more than 500 locations in the state of Connected Connecticut. It's good to have you both with us. Jeffrey, I want to start with you, and I think, you know, because. Or, excuse me, Alan, I want to start with you. I think a lot of people get. They kind of think about like, okay, what is the right platform that I'm supposed to use in this increasingly AI world to understand what is going on with my symptoms, what is going on with my body? This is something that you and the team at K Health have been thinking about for a lot longer than I think we've been playing with ChatGPT. What's the right answer to that?
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Alan Block
The right answer is that we have to embrace AI for health care and as part of the clinical care team. It's been a long time coming because as we all know, health care has a lot of issues around access, around cost, around quality. People are clamoring to ask a lot of questions and get answers to the issues, whether they're mundane issues, whether there's symptoms, whether the labs. We've all seen a situation where you get your lab results from the doctor and your cholesterol is high, your vitamins D is low, and now you're waiting to speak to the office. Why not?
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Carol Massar
You get those results before you actually, the doctor calls you with those results, you get the lab in your app.
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Tim Stenovec
I always look at the levels that I'm googling and I'm like checking.
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Carol Massar
Or you just do a screenshot and throw it in AI.
- [03:46]
Alan Block
Exactly. But that's kind of a triage dead end, right? Because you're coming there and. And you're asking questions. And look, LLMs are wonderful, but they also tend to hallucinate sometimes. Sometimes wrong, but very confident. And medicine is complex. So what we're announcing together with Hartford Healthcare is the ability to take all the wonderful capabilities you have with a ChatGPT or Gemini or an LLM. But we built it, we grounded it on your medical record, on your insurance, and as part of a health system. So it's not a free for all. Come in, test it out. Great. Maybe it's helpful, maybe it's not. In the end, what do you get? You get some kind of summary for a doctor. It is the ability to connect it into the visit. You can come in, you can ask your question, that same lab question, or my head hurts or my rash. Take a picture, whatever you need to do. Have a conversation. But it becomes a medical conversation grounded by our capabilities. We built a system that's data driven, that's already been used by millions of patients in the US including at Hartford Healthcare and Mayo Clinic and Cedars Sinai and Mass General, and it's all connected. So now you can ask a question, but let's say now your labs are off, your vitamin D is off. What do you do? Well, maybe you need just information, but maybe you also want medical advice. You can book an appointment there, and then it's all connected.
- [05:04]
Tim Stenovec
Jeff, come on into the conversation. Good to have you here. Of course. Jeffrey flacks, President and CEO of Hartford Healthcare. You guys, $7 billion enterprise caring for more than 27,000 people daily. Your team shared that with us. What were you looking for as we all try to still figure out how AI fits into the puzzle.
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Jeffrey Flax
Yeah. Thank you, Tim and Carol, thank you for having me as part of your show today. Look, historically, healthcare has been fragmented. Information is inconsistent and variable. Healthcare is largely transactional. And it really, it must be better. It ought to be better. And we're trying to solve for this. We have a mandate to make healthcare better. And what I'm so excited about is, as Alon was describing, what we're creating today, what we're working to build is a system that is both seamless and coordinated and that it moves healthcare from being a transaction to being relational and removing that fragmentation. So what's so beautiful about what we're creating is now when a consumer, effectively our patient, a person, enters this system, it's embedded within their electronic health record. So it has their personal information, their data, and it's protected. And that data and the information that they're searching for is in coordination with their providers. And when they need, should they need that next level of care, it seamlessly makes those appointments for them and it does it through AI level support. So it's truly both integrated and easy to operate and convenient. So, you know, I really do see this. What we're working to do is create a true breakthrough. Yeah. To make healthcare more consumer centric.
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Tim Stenovec
And my understanding you guys are to some extent, I think, in the testing phase at this point, but I want to bring Elon back into this conversation because I think one of the things we are increasingly hearing is kind of where AI is going in that, you know, potentially we could have vertical data sets. So the data isn't everything that's on the LLM, but, but it's very specific to a certain industry or category so that you don't have hallucinating going on that it's a really kind of smarter database. Is that kind of where things are going or is this part of how you guys are thinking about it?
- [07:17]
Alan Block
Absolutely. This is a vertical offering. It is context aware. That means it knows that you're a patient of Heartwar healthcare. It knows, say that you have hypertension or diabetes. It knows that you had a doctor visit or a cardiologist visit a month ago and can take that all into account. It's not trying to answer all the questions about the world just around your health. Broadly speaking. You might have questions about prevention, you might have questions about lifestyle and family history, but it's verticalized.
- [07:47]
Carol Massar
What if you see doctors though in a different health system? And I think it's fair to say I can only contextually think about the New York environment here. But I have doctors at Weill Cornell, nyu, One Medical, multiple apps. And those are all EPIC systems, right? Or two of the three probably run by EPIC systems. But those don't all talk to each other. Like I have to tell the one medical doctor about what I did at Weill Cornell.
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Alan Block
I'm going to try and fix the world problems one at a time. But I'm just going to say that's the advantage of a system like Hartford Healthcare because let's start there. First of all, it's the largest system in Connecticut and Jeff can talk about the system, but you can provide a full blown menu from urgent care and primary care, online and in person, all the way to specialty and surgery. So I think one of the disadvantages is being fragmented. Your data is fragmented. Yes, there might be some solutions and sometimes they integrate, but you really want your medical record to be in front of a doctor and you want the intelligence and the eye to be part of that care team and helping part of that. So actually that's a great case study. You should not be spread across three systems, you should be in one.
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Tim Stenovec
So Jeff, I mean is that the end game? Like how are you are comfortable with ultimately? Is that what we need, one big system that kind of serves people. We talk about this having kind of a healthcare dossier where it's just everything is in one place. Any doctor, any healthcare facility you go to can access. How do you think about that as a healthcare provider?
- [09:14]
Jeffrey Flax
Yeah, look, the challenge today in healthcare, right? Healthcare is not as accessible as it needs to be and must be. It takes too long to see a provider, too long to work through a suspicion of a concern to a confirmed diagnosis. We have to do it better and we have the capability today to do it much differently and make these improvements. Secondly, issues around affordability, we have to be able to ensure that people are getting the best and highest quality and safest care. But doing it through an organized, coordinated process that makes healthcare being done at the most affordable and best location. And third, around quality and safety, we have to be able to measure quality and safety. We have to demonstrate outcomes and be able to demonstrate that we can do better.
- [09:58]
Tim Stenovec
I want to come back in a second, Alon, but Jeff, one thing I think, I think it would be fair to say just having conversations in our newsroom about medical care is that people want access to doctors and they want more time with their doctors. And I think that is a problem. How does that help get to that?
- [10:13]
Jeffrey Flax
Yeah, well, first of all, this is what it's all about. So we have, with K health, we have 24. 7 care. So we will see. We've seen 50,000 people now since last April who at any point in time can schedule care or they can get immediate care. We have 50 urgent care centers. We are in Walgreens pharmacies. We partner with Amazon One Medical. We are in airports through on med kiosk systems. So a health system needs to create 1000 front doors, but they need to be coordinated through one electronic health record organized around the patient. So inverting the health system to be organized around the patient. And that's what's exciting about what we're creating with this product because it's embedded in the electronic health record and its tentacles reach into every one of those access points. So access is king in terms of getting people meeting them where they want to be met and getting them the level of care that they ask for in need.
- [11:13]
Tim Stenovec
Elon, I know you wanted to come back in.
- [11:15]
Alan Block
Yeah. Look, I think two really, really important things. People want to use AI, but they want to use it in a trusted environment. Hartford Healthcare launched it after a series of studies that they did that they're putting out publicly and putting it out for the whole world to see. And that's completely different from just coming in and, hey, I tried something. I don't know if it's right or wrong. So the fact that Hartford Healthcare putting their stamp on approval on technology that we built and they helped us design, I think is a game changer. And this is that oil and water that doesn't exist today. The other really, really important thing that you said, you said people want more time with a doctor. The problem is the doctor is spending all their time collecting information, pulling out your medical record, because easily could that take 20 minutes and then writing summaries. We do all that stuff in the back end and we provide the doctor a lot of insights around their triage potential. Diagnosis and treatment. So now the doctor can focus on the patient and still see more patients. Because a lot of people underestimate how much work there is before and after the visit. And this is a lot of that. That's core to healthcare as well. So when you come in, you want the doctor ready to be educated about you. Take into account they might not remember you, maybe they haven't seen you in a while, maybe a lot of things happen. So that ability to take that and distill that. Because medicine is complicated. Not everything's a sore throat, you know?
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Tim Stenovec
Well, and to be fair, like people can have the same diagnosis, yet it's different for each patient. So how do we make sure that the AI or the system is picking up those nuances that are important for a doctor to have or know?
- [12:46]
Alan Block
That's a critical question. And this is why trust matters so much. And that's what we built. This is based on hundreds of millions of medical charts that we've read. We've been training this for eight years. Jeff mentioned we went live with Hartford, it's seen 50,000 patients. Our AI is already working, seeing patients and he's part of the care team now. So it's no longer a separate world. So now you're in a world where a doctor is much more efficient, but can have a much more higher quality visit. They're spending time with the patient, they served up information. Maybe there's drug to drug interactions they need to take into account. Maybe something's not quite right with this patient. Maybe this kind of migraine or this manifestation of a headache is behaving different from a normal migraine. All this stuff needs to be teased out and of course the doctor in the end needs to make the diagnosis and treatment decision. And that's incredibly powerful. Like you're giving these doctors AI superpowers in a way that they couldn't do it before.
- [13:39]
Carol Massar
This partnership along with Harvard Healthcare, how big is it in terms of the other partnerships that you have? And also the idea of you having your sort of own consumer facing business, but also being integrated into other health systems. How does that relationship work?
- [13:55]
Alan Block
So first of all, we've moved to focus entirely on the health system.
- [13:57]
Carol Massar
So you're not doing consumer facing anymore, but we could still use or see your product maybe in like the Sydney app for Anthem, for example.
- [14:04]
Alan Block
Yeah, but we focus, we moved to focus entirely on health systems. We were in Sydney app. There was an evolution. I couldn't come to Mayo Clinic or Hartford Healthcare and knock on the door and say, hey, here's an algorithm. And here's the doctor I needed to have the credibility and prove this out. So it took many years to build. It's not a one year exercise, but we now have six major partners.
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Carol Massar
And this is what you're exclusively focused on?
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Alan Block
Exclusively focused. And we're adding now about a partnership amount. So this is now growing really quickly because people realize they had the absolute need for access and for this ability to add AI into the team.
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Carol Massar
How do you make sure Claude or Anthropic doesn't come after this part of your business? Well, how do you protect it?
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Alan Block
First of all, I think we live in their world, right. So they're going to be around. I'm sure we'll be great partners down the road. We have conversations with a lot of the big platforms, but they're focused on a lot of general purpose things. Maybe they're focused more on coding as well. But we are not here to just give you generic health information. We are here to help you with anything around health and lifestyle that's tied to a clinical need. Where Harvard Healthcare in the case of Connecticut can solve your issue. Again, move you around. You might need to move from information to a visit to a lab to a test. You might need the world's foremost oncologist. You know, so people need, that is what we focus on. And trust me, that's not an easy, even if you're got billions of dollars, it's not easy to go and build it. And you need the right partners.
- [15:31]
Tim Stenovec
Jeff, save 30 seconds for you. Do health care professionals like it? Do doctors like it? Do nurses like the system so far?
- [15:37]
Jeffrey Flax
Just quickly they do. And the reason they do is that it's coordinated. Right. So it's not separate, it's integrated and it makes health care better. And it's organized around the specific patient, the specific patient's information and then the information is exchanged and provided directly back to the provider. So it's a closed loop process.
- [15:56]
Alan Block
Yeah.
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Jeffrey Flax
And my point, my final point, it's about a relationship with this patient, not just a singular transaction.
- [16:02]
Tim Stenovec
Interesting stuff, guys. Stay in touch and let us know how it's going. Jeff Blacks, president and CEO at Hartford Health Care, joining us from Hartford, Connecticut, right here in studio, Elon Block. He is co founder and CEO of K Health. Gentlemen, thank you so much.
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Christina Raffini
Really appreciate it. Look forward to hearing more.
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Amy Morris
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