Dan Vahdat is the founder and CEO of Huma Therapeutics, a global health care artificial intelligence (AI) company focused on transforming care and research through digital solutions. While pursuing his PhD in Bioengineering and Mechanical Engineering at Johns Hopkins, Dan was inspired to create Huma. Today, Huma partners with over 4,500 hospitals and clinics, serving more than 50 million patients across 70 countries.

Dan Vahdat, Founder & CEO of Huma Therapeutics

The Pulse: Can you introduce yourself and how you came to create Huma?

Dan Vahdat: I was a student at Johns Hopkins doing my PhD and was exposed to Hopkins Hospital and health systems in the area. Growing up in a family of doctors, I was also exposed to the industry in many ways. The more I learned, the more I realized we know a lot about patients when they’re inside the hospital or with doctors for their visits, but we know almost nothing once they leave. This is true for both complex patients and those with chronic conditions like asthma, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), and hypertension. That’s why I started Huma—to bring visibility back to the care team and make medicine more proactive and predictive, rather than reactive like it is now. Our goal is to accelerate the adoption of digital technology across health care and research, which will drive more proactive, predictive care.

We initially focused on rare disease patients. Over time, we expanded to include larger chronic disease populations, but at the core of what we do is data collection. We’ve been working on this for about 10 years and recently received FDA Class I/II approval, which allows us to launch programs for different use cases with regulatory clearance—a rare achievement.

We realized that no single company can address all 20,000 diseases, so we’ve opened our platform to others, empowering hospitals and pharmaceutical companies to build on it. Our goal is to democratize health care, decentralize care, and enable everyone to contribute. We bring patient data into centralized systems, and it’s up to our clients to define who monitors and acts on it.

The Pulse: Can you provide context on what health care AI/digital care looks like right now and the gaps your company is trying to solve for?

DV: We’re trying to accelerate the adoption of technology across the board, and we started with rare diseases. It wasn’t commercially viable to create one app for every rare disease since that would cost millions, so we built a disease-agnostic platform that allows anyone to launch solutions for different diseases. Most companies focus on larger diseases like diabetes, but we took a different approach—if you can solve rare diseases, you can solve anything. Our platform has become a way to accelerate other people’s work by bringing their innovations into our marketplace, whether it’s an algorithm, integration with hospitals, a treatment platform, or a device. Think of it like the Apple Store—there are apps made by Apple, but most come from outside developers.

In the past, building these apps would take three to four years and millions of dollars to get through FDA or EU approval. With our platform, people can start from scratch or pick a template and quickly build out a solution. In just one or two days, they can have an FDA-approved application. You can add features like symptom checkers, coaching for specific cohorts, multi-country coverage, or integrations with hospitals and monitoring systems. The flexibility of our platform allows you to launch solutions rapidly, while we handle the regulatory frameworks, much like the Apple Store’s review process.

When a patient-facing app is built, we also provide a control center or dashboard for doctors, nurses, coaches, and researchers, making it easier to collect and act on data for clinical trials or patient care. This is how we’re enabling the next generation of digital health solutions.

The Pulse: What strategies has Huma employed to adapt its solutions to different health care markets and regulations worldwide, ensuring that innovation is both scalable and sustainable?

DV: I don’t recommend anyone building a health care company to do anything outside the U.S. The U.S. represents half of the world’s expenditure for health care, and in my view, it’s not smart to focus outside of the U.S. However, if you’re working with pharma, they sell globally, and when they launch something, they don’t want multiple solutions in different countries. That’s when it makes sense to go global.

When we built the Huma platform, we worked with pharma companies globally. Our platform supports over 70 countries. If a pharma company wants to launch an app or digital program alongside their drugs for their cohort in 40, 50, or 60 countries, they want partners who offer global support, which is why we built the platform to meet those needs. But for most health care companies, the U.S. should be the focus.

The Pulse: What emerging technologies do you believe will have the most significant impact on health care in the next decade, and how is Huma positioning itself in these areas?

DV: The new AI models will have the most significant impact on health care in the next decade by automating cumbersome tasks, freeing up time for humans to focus on higher-value work. With health care expenditures at $4.6 trillion, nearly half of which goes toward salaries, and a significant shortage of health care workers, leveraging AI can make nurses more efficient—enabling them to care for more patients while working the same or fewer hours. This is what excites us at Huma, and we’ve already launched solutions that address these challenges.

The Pulse: What advice would you offer to new entrepreneurs looking to make a lasting impact in health care innovation, based on your experiences with Huma?

DV: I think one of the things people always talk about in entrepreneurship and innovation is technology and software. While having a good product is important, sometimes you need to innovate other things in parallel—like human resources, business models, organizational structures, and operational models. These can be equally important. At Huma, we’ve invented an unusual model to run the company because we felt the traditional model of building software and selling it to hospitals wasn’t working. Our model includes the Huma cloud platform, which is foundational and allows you to launch any use case. Then, for each use case, we have field CEOs who take charge and focus on success in specific diseases. They operate like founders, with profit-sharing incentives tied to what they generate, rather than commission structures. This model has worked well for us, and we’re constantly recruiting unique talent. If someone wants to start a company, we give them the resources and support to make it successful. We’re super excited about this model, as it’s quite unusual in our industry.

Interviewed by Anna Marie Manning, November 27, 2024.