Gary Gottlieb is the newest independent member of the IMO Health Board of Directors. In a recent interview, we asked him about the most pressing – and promising – issues in healthcare and what he’s most excited about when it comes to advising the business. Below is an edited transcript of that conversation.
What do you feel is the biggest challenge in healthcare today?
The biggest challenge is meeting the needs of the populations that we serve with the full spectrum of services and care. This care must be equitable, easily accessible, affordable, demonstrably effective, and efficient.
What emerging technologies do you believe have the potential to revolutionize healthcare in the next 5-10 years?
I believe that technologies that both democratize access to care and reduce uncertainty in clinical decision making will revolutionize clinical medicine. Digital medicine broadly is creating a breathtaking opportunity to vastly improve health and health care.
One of very few silver linings in the great tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic was the acceleration of the adoption, evolution, and investment in tools to enable nearly instantaneous access to clinical resources. These tools also facilitated the collection and curation of vast amounts of data. Telemedicine allowed for potential access to expertise and care to nearly every geography. This platform brought monitoring and care right into people’s homes, even in very remote “medical deserts.” This further enabled an emerging explosion in structured and unstructured data collection from electronic health records, digital clinical and monitoring devices, wearables, and a plethora of other sources. The brilliance of informatics and data science are enhancing the value of those data enormously. We are already realizing improvements in administrative efficiency, in the support of clinical decision making, in the employment and accuracy of diagnostic tools and in the selection of appropriate therapies.
Curation of these data and the power of emerging data science and genomics are driving greater precision in diagnosis and care. Doctors seek to tailor treatments to each of us individually rather than treating a disease or a symptom in the same way for everyone. So far, we’ve made the most progress in precision medicine in cancer treatment, using tissue genomics to diagnose, guide and monitor therapy for specific tumors.
Why did you join the IMO Health Board of Directors and what are you most excited about for this business?
I think that IMO Health is a remarkably exciting company. It has been a trusted partner with healthcare providers for 30 years and the company has been able to help those providers – largely hospitals and hospital systems – to figure out how to use the data they are generating, to organize it and to inform clinical decision making. IMO Health has also effectively improved documentation and communication and helped providers to produce data to support more accurate and compliant billing. As technology has advanced, there’s so much more opportunity for the company to use those trusted relationships to further empower its provider clients in the service of their patients.
I’m deeply interested in the ways in which technology can improve the human condition. This company is perfectly positioned to be a superb partner at an incredibly exciting time. IMO Health’s products sit at the source of documentation. They are in the EHR, right at the moment when fingers touch the keyboard or data are entered electronically. What a remarkable opportunity for the cleanest and most efficient way to gather patient data. IMO Health can make those data useful, interpretable, and immediately available for evaluation and analysis!
You have an impressive resume that includes leading both a large hospital system and a global NGO. What lessons have you learned in those positions that will inform your new role?
It is a remarkable privilege to be included in a company’s governance. First and foremost, a board must be the steward of the organization’s mission. This board must fully understand IMO Health’s overall purpose and support its values. Moreover, the board needs to help shape what the company intends to do, what it aims to deliver and what strategies and tactics it will employ. Finally, the board must ensure that the company has what it needs to serve its customers perfectly and impact the market more broadly. I’ve been a manager for a long time, and I deeply respect the importance of great company leadership. As an independent board member, it’s my responsibility to support and empower management. I hope to bring a fresh set of eyes to help address challenges and to find new opportunities for the company.
I am inspired by IMO Health’s tireless efforts to vastly improve provider workflows related to documentation and communication. When I was CEO of a large academic integrated delivery system, my colleagues and I oversaw the installation and implementation of Epic across the system. Moving to a single enterprise-wide EHR from many platforms and from paper charts to digital records disrupted the workflow of thousands of extraordinary and committed providers. I couldn’t be more enthusiastic about how we can help all organizations and their providers to find the best pathway to find the easiest workflows with the least burden of time and effort.
At Partners in Health, we faced numerous challenges delivering care to millions in need. Whether in West Africa during the Ebola epidemic or in delivering primary and maternal health care in rural Rwanda, Malawi, or Lesotho, our remarkable teams and the extraordinary people of the countries where we worked always used data to inform decision making. Our physicians, nurses, community health workers and our managers persistently demonstrated the importance of technology to support problem solving in order to best serve the needs of patients and their communities.
