Ashish V. Shah, CEO of Prepared Health

While many of us tend to think of healthcare happening in the labs of biotech firms or the wards of hospitals, Prepared Health focuses on an entirely different and rapidly growing frontier. With an emphasis in senior care and quality of life in one’s own home, they leverage technology and data to coordinate the care that happens outside of the hospital: reducing costs and keeping patients happier. The Pulse sat down with Founder and CEO Ashish V. Shah to learn more about Prepared Health’s origins and vision for the future of home health.

The Pulse: Can you talk about how you got started in the home health space, and what your mission and vision has been with Prepared Health?

AVS: Our company is approaching its five-year anniversary which is kind of hard for me to imagine. And it came as a byproduct of a previous venture that I was a CTO for, Medicity. We’d built the market leader in heath information exchanges at that time, really helping with interoperability from hospitals to primary care and labs, and it was acquired by Aetna in 2011.

I share all that because it was part of the story of why Prepared, why now. Six months after that acquisition my father suddenly passed away, which was the beginning of the journey that shined a really bright light on what’s needed moving forward, the new frontier really, to align with our interview here. My father was a senior, he was being seen by in-home caregivers, in and out of senior centers. When he passed, we spent time with all of them, and what we found was that these individuals had meaningful insights around his health, saw a decline coming, and didn’t have a way to share that information with somebody who could have intervened, including the families. I decided to leave Aetna to start Prepared Health, focused on helping people live their very best life, on their terms.

First and foremost, we help hospitals and health plans identify who are the right types of partners in the senior care continuum. Second, we equip them with a technology platform that allows them to work together in concert, even though they’re all distributed. Third, we support these organizations by applying a number of predictive models to data that they’re collecting, and then share those insights back to hospitals and health plans.

The Pulse: On the data and the modeling side – what are some insights that hospitals or nursing facilities can collect to help seniors live their best lives?

AVS: Going back to our previous company Medicity, we had lots of clinical data, but it was all sourced at the hospital. In the hospital, you have visit history, medications, pre- and post-op summaries and other transcribed reports, which is great. It only gives you a 10% view of what’s happening in an individual’s life. Insurers and ACOs are looking at other sources to fill in the picture, like claims data, but this data is typically not actionable because of its age (i.e., 90 days old), and administrative purpose (i.e., billing).

When we apply our predictive models to these assessments, we can uncover, for example, whether somebody lives alone at home, are they struggling with preparing light meals? Are they having difficulty making their primary care appointments because of transportation or other challenges? Do they have emerging behavioral or mental health? We love functional assessments that are being performed in post-acute and home-base care environments.

When we work with Non-medical Home Care agencies, we focus on incident reporting and other types of lightweight screening that’s being performed in the. There’s lots of data in this part of the continuum, but it may not be clean, or coming out of an EMR in the traditional hospital sense.

The Pulse: What kind of roles are you playing in the senior home care landscape? Do you have partnerships with nursing facilities to use your technology to provide better care for seniors? What is the end goal of Prepared Health?

AVS: The goal at scale is to bring the senior care continuum online and then allow them to work in collaboration with health systems, health plans, families- three really motivated parties that have typically been disconnected from home-based care. In our next stage of development, we are evaluating whether we introduce our own care coordinators and make them available within our product. Our care coordinators could be a nurse, physical therapist, or possibly a medical social worker. Today, navigation and coordination is a secondary job.

The Pulse: Right now, you are a strategic partner to existing players in the market. But eventually, do you plan to have your own full-service product in the market?

AVS: Everyone’s trying to stay true to just one specific model, services or technology. We haven’t seen that work well in healthcare. We may run to a group that says we have made the investment in people, we feel very confident our approach, we just need the technology and the data. We have a number of those relationships today, including Jefferson Health. Down the road, we may run into smaller organizations who haven’t been able to make that investment and say, we would love to brand your service, and have you solved this problem for us, and that’s fine. Whatever it takes to get the right outcomes.

The Pulse: When you think about the concept of the new frontiers in healthcare, what are some things that come to mind? What are things that Prepared Health is doing that are already been pushing the new frontier? What are some things that you are looking to do?

AVS: I’m going to quote one of our partners: “You’re building the operating system for the home”. When I think about the new frontier, I think of the home as a care setting and the healthy days at home. You’re hearing organizations like Humana talk about this publicly. Rather than thinking about the number of days in a hospital, think about how many healthy days at home an individual has had.

The next frontier is to build on this description of an operating system for the home. The first step, which is where we play in today, is how do you actually staff and coordinate all these different professional services into the home? The next step is how do you coach up that family caregiver and an extension of the professional care team?

On harvesting data, when any of these services are being delivered, how do we intervene faster in that care setting? With the service infrastructure being organized, we are beginning to look at remote patient monitoring, especially as it is becoming more affordable. We like things like Google acquiring Fitbit at a high level as it improves affordability and accessibility.

The Pulse: I’m curious to hear little bit more about some feedback that you have received from your partners.

AVS: The feedback is great – we are solving a very necessary and large problem for the market.

Our business scales very nicely. We often hear, “When you solve this problem for seniors, it can be easily applied to Medicaid, pediatrics and a number of other types of populations.” We are operating in a massive market. The operating system we are building is critical. We’re in the early innings of this game, we have a long way to go.

Interviewed by May Li in December 2019