Health-E Law Podcast Ep. 10
Assessing Data Assets in Healthcare with Arti Bedi Pullins of QuestionPro
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Listen to the podcast released June 27, 2024 here: https://www.sheppard.com/multimedia-575
Welcome to Health-e Law, Sheppard Mullin's podcast exploring the fascinating health tech topics and trends of the day. In this episode, Arti Bedi Pullins, President and Chief Healthcare Officer at QuestionPro, joins us to discuss how the healthcare sector is increasingly recognizing and leveraging data as an asset, including how data is being collected for value-based or outcome-based payment models.
About Arti Pullins
Arti Bedi Pullins is a strategic, data-driven entrepreneur with 20+ years of experience in leading business strategy, product innovation, digital marketing and end-to-end divisional deployment for Healthcare, HealthTech, Health & Wellness and Tech companies. Her passion sits at the intersection of customer-based design thinking, innovative technology and accurate market data and research. Arti is President and Chief Healthcare Officer of QuestionPro.
Throughout her 19-year career, Arti has architected and led over a dozen technology companies toward double and triple-digit growth by applying market, customer and product research to understand how consumers impact brand engagement and adoption. Prior to founding Pundit Consultantz, which was recently acquired by QuestionPro, she held senior leadership roles with SessionM, Glassdoor and CareerBuilder.com.
Arti holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and a bachelor’s degree in sociology and communications from Michigan State University.
About Sara Shanti
A partner in the Corporate Practice Group in the Sheppard Mullin's Chicago office and co-lead of its Digital Health Team, Sara Shanti’s practice sits at the forefront of healthcare technology by providing practical counsel on novel innovation and complex data privacy matters. Using her medical research background and HHS experience, Sara advises providers, payors, start-ups, technology companies, and their investors and stakeholders on digital healthcare and regulatory compliance matters, including artificial intelligence (AI), augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR), gamification, implantable and wearable devices, and telehealth.
At the cutting edge of advising on "data as an asset" programming, Sara's practice supports investment in innovation and access to care initiatives, including mergers and acquisitions involving crucial, high-stakes and sensitive data, medical and wellness devices, and web-based applications and care.
About Phil Kim
A partner in the Corporate and Securities Practice Group in Sheppard Mullin's Dallas office and co-lead of its Digital Health Team, Phil Kim has a number of clients in digital health. He has assisted multinational technology companies entering the digital health space with various service and collaboration agreements for their wearable technology, along with global digital health companies bolstering their platform in the behavioral health space. He also assists public medical device, biotechnology, and pharmaceutical companies, as well as the investment banks that serve as underwriters in public securities offerings for those companies.
Phil also assists various healthcare companies on transactional and regulatory matters. He counsels healthcare systems, hospitals, ambulatory surgery centers, physician groups, home health providers, and other healthcare companies on the buy- and sell-side of mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, and operational matters, which include regulatory, licensure, contractual, and administrative issues. Phil regularly advises clients on matters related to healthcare compliance, including liability exposure, the Stark law, anti-kickback statutes, and HIPAA/HITECH privacy issues. He also provides counsel on state and federal laws, business structuring formation, employment issues, and involving government agencies, including state and federal agencies.
Transcript:
Sara Shanti:
This is Health-e Law, a podcast dedicated to the exciting and sometimes explosive interaction between technology and law in the healthcare space.
Phil Kim:
Hosted by Sheppard Mullin's digital health team, each episode covers innovations that impact healthcare, like AI, virtual reality, and even wearable devices.
Sara Shanti:
We'll dive into the legal implications of health tech you should know about, visit with trailblazing players in the industry and have a little bit of fun along the way.
Phil Kim:
So let's get to it. Welcome to another edition of Health-e Law.
Sara Shanti:
Hi, I'm Sara.
Phil Kim:
And I'm Phil. And we're excited to be joined by Arti Bedi Pullins, who is a strategic data-driven entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience in leading business strategy, product innovation, digital marketing, and end-to-end divisional deployment for healthcare, health tech, health and wellness in tech companies. Arti is the president and chief healthcare officer of QuestionPro. So thank you so much for joining us here today, Arti.
Arti Bedi Pullins:
Thank you, Phil.
Phil Kim:
We're excited to have you here and really right off the bat, our first question is talking about the thing that you look at all day every day, which is what we see everywhere where we looked, industry players waking up to the fact that data is incredibly valuable and critical to the success of their company in healthcare. So how do you see data being recognized as an asset?
Arti Bedi Pullins:
Yeah, healthcare has been an incredible data-driven industry for, gosh, decades. Even if you look back, the history of the way we consume and practice healthcare here in United States, we've been collecting and looking at data over the last hundred years. It has just changed a lot over time, especially in these last 20 years. And with digital technology, our cell phones, our watches, our iPads, our digital devices, our sensors, it's evolving both at a fast, exciting, but also a little bit of nerve-wracking times for all players in healthcare. And everybody's trying to figure out what is the right amount of data to collect, how to ensure safety, security, privacy. And then most importantly, everybody who's in healthcare takes the same vow. Whether you are a physician, whether you are a payor on the insurance side, whether you're people like us consuming healthcare, you just want to make sure people are safe, they're being taken care of, and their outcomes are being judged according to the data that's being presented.
Sara Shanti:
And Arti, you had just mentioned a whole list of different ways that data is collected, in this digital world especially. From your perspective, your business is data analytics, where are you seeing healthcare data being collected? I know it can be across all of those facets, but where are you seeing some of the really interesting and valuable places that valuable data is being collected through the industry right now?
Arti Bedi Pullins:
Data collection is happening a couple of different ways. So let's kind of break down a couple of areas of healthcare in the healthcare ecosystem. One is us. We are the patients, right? We are divulging data through either telling our physician when you are going and meeting with a physician or any electronics that we are wearing and we're surrounded by. Think of Fitbits, think of your Peloton, think of your iPhone, Apple Watches, your Android equipment. So all that digital equipment is sort of collecting data.
The other part of it is providers. There's a lot of P’s in the healthcare world. Providers, these are our healthcare specialists. So either your nurses, your clinicians, your doctors, your surgeons, they are collecting data through multiple different things, sensors or equipment that you are wearing or keeping a track of. Medicine, therapeutics, the huge array of digital therapeutics that healthcare is doing now. Then you have your administrative and payer, so your insurance companies, CMS, reimbursement. Now this is more concentrated on the USA side. Internationally healthcare operates a lot differently. They are looking at data, everything from your EHR systems, electronic health records, electronic billing. How often is both a patient and a provider interacting and what the level of care is happening and how to be a little bit more proactive versus reactive. It's almost these different segments of healthcare, I would say, Sara, to your question, that they are collecting data in different ways and then using it for the improving outcomes point of view.
Phil Kim:
As we know, any industry player here understands the great debate with data, which is particularly with healthcare data, you have concerns with respect to patient privacy. And of course, data is also incredibly powerful in supporting commercial success. How do you see industry players, companies like QuestionPro and others balancing patient privacy concerns on one hand to commercial needs on the other?
Arti Bedi Pullins:
This is a debate, Phil, that is happening pretty actively right now all across the private and the public sector. And there's going to continue to be more, I hate to use the word regulation, but regulation and compliance that is going to continually build in order to ensure we as patients, our data is safe, our data is being used to improve care and not being used to jack up insurance rates. So premium rates or not provide us the preventative care we need in order to keep life and keep our health moving forward. And that generative AI, large language model debate, which has just sort of kicked off in the last three years, and that's a big part of data collection that we are all trying to figure out together right now.
Sara Shanti:
That's perfectly said, I think, Arti, that it's not going away. It's something that's being dealt with daily, especially, sure, from what you're seeing with your customers and the industry, and I know you do more than healthcare. But one thing that we're seeing is there's privacy and security, but then there's also that integrity of data. Are you seeing any kind of interesting trends, or do you have tips on how to engage patients and consumers to not only give them transparency and trust so that you get the best possible data from them?
Arti Bedi Pullins:
My personal opinion is you have to be upfront and honest with your patient or whoever you are collecting the data from. You can be in a clinical trial, whether you're up with a pharma company, you can be a provider, which is your healthcare specialist, or you can be your insurance company. And I think as long as to the end consumer, all of us on this podcast and everybody listening, if you can be upfront and transparent on what that data collection from a health perspective you are trying to do and the why behind it, I actually feel like people are open to it. More and more people are getting open to it and are okay with the fact that health data is being collected. I think when it happens quietly, hidden in the middle of the night, that's when everybody starts to distrust it and says, "Oh, oh, the robots are coming to get me, or are watching me." It's the fear of the unknown.
So I think within our ecosystem of healthcare, if we can continually be open and upfront, what is it that you're collecting, the reason of the collection behind it, the usage of it. I collected your data already, what am I going to do with your health data and why am I collecting it? I think people are more open to it. I also think we are in this revolution slash evolution of health data and it's a generational difference. So if you look at, none of my grandparents unfortunately are alive, but if you look at my parents' generation, my parents are in their mid to late-seventies, there is a little bit of a fear factor of sharing health data. It's an unknown, it's new. It's just sort of come up truly really in your face in the last four and a half years post-pandemic. So it's causing a little bit of anxiety because, "Well, I've never had to share my data before. Why do I have to do it now?"
Then you have my generation. I think our generation is kind of like on the fence. We know what all of these digital health technology devices are. We are living in it, we're working in it, we're talking about it. So we are open to it, but it's also like we're also caregivers to our parents, our generation. So we are in this teeter-totter. Some days it feels good, some days you feel like, "Oh, oh, there's too much AI, generative AI, LLM data coming out and I don't know what to do with it."
And then even my beautiful kids, they're not going to know any different. And when they are in their mid-thirties, mid-forties, where I am today, who knows, maybe they'll listen to this podcast and be like, "Mom, what were you talking about? You were so old!" But for that generation, it's a totally different point of use. That's why I used the word evolution revolution. I feel like we're in the middle of this toppling over between how is data given out, how is data being consumed, how is artificial intelligence as well as generative AI, as well as large language models and healthcare being used, and it's very transformative.
Phil Kim:
As far as what we're seeing, we see healthcare moving towards more of a value-based or outcome-based focus. Those types of payment models, as you know, rely heavily on data collections to track outcomes of care. So how is data being collected for these payment models as far as what you can tell?
Arti Bedi Pullins:
I think this was almost 20, maybe 25 years ago, the EHR, electronic health record, electronic medical record systems were really almost made mandatory from a CMS reimbursement standpoint. I think it was during, don't quote me on this, but I think it was during Obama's first term that it really became mandated here in the US of these recording systems. And that's how all of this billing and current payment, whether it's private insurance, whether it's CMS, whether it's Medicare or Medicaid or supplemental insurance, all of that is being driven out of these record systems in order to ensure value-based care and more of this outcome-based. Now it's by no means perfect. I'm sure you've had other experts on your podcast that will say, "Oh, there's a lot of leakage that is happening in the data collection as well as the payment processes standpoint." But it is a pass forward that is happening.
One of the most recent ones that has been successful within this outcomes base, I would actually say, payment models, it existed before COVID, but it really took off post-COVID, is hospital at home. It's a healthcare policy and process in order to make sure if a patient with certain disease states or use cases can go home, not stay in a hospital, not take up a hospital bed. This was all about bed and capacity needs back in the day during the pandemic times. But how can you transfer a patient back home and still give him or her the same hospital care, but in the comfort of their home?
Sara Shanti:
That's excellent, Arti, and I think a lot of what you're saying mimics what we've heard from other guests and from the industry being really excited about hospital at home, not only some of the reimbursement and the outcome objective there, but also the remote patient monitoring and the data sharing to allow people to be in their home, get good care, great access. So in addition to all the things you just mentioned, including hospital at home and some of the new deliverables, what other opportunities are you excited about in watching data collection and using data as assets for healthcare?
Arti Bedi Pullins:
I don't know if your listeners would totally agree with me, but I'm a very tech-driven, tech-loving person. Obviously that's my entire background. I feel like we can use data, technology to actually help with a lot of preventative care opportunities that we are just slowly dipping our toes in. Everything from a genetic hereditary health standpoint. I'm hundred percent Indian female. That in itself puts me in some genetic code, obviously, and some tendency that I will have and bring with me. And how can technology, personal health data, historical medical data for myself, my family history, as well as my current patterns, help me be healthier, help me make better health decisions so that it is a little bit more predictive in nature versus reactive in nature, which is what the healthcare system is in the United States today is, "Oh, oh, something happened, something triggered and that's why I need access to care or access to healthcare or medicine." And, and, and, and.
Then sort of this circle of being involved in healthcare gets started, an event has to trigger. Something joyous is happening, but then you sort of get looped into this healthcare ecosystem. So in my perfect scenario, in the conversations I had with my colleagues, both clinical experts, tech experts, and then everybody else in the ecosystem, how can we use technology? How can we use data? How can we use these incredible new advancements of intelligence sense being created to be more predictive and to create better forward-facing health standards and also make it more communal in nature?
There's a famous saying that your zip code is way more important than your DNA code. I think that's kind of how it goes. Because I'm lucky, I live in Chicago, I'm surrounded by incredible, incredible health systems, but what happens to our community that lives in rural parts of this country then doesn't have access to that. So technology, advancement in AI, advancement in generative AI, large language models, can only help us expand and expediate preventative care more. At least that's what I believe, at least the techie in me. I believe on the good of it versus the robots are not coming to get us. I don't believe that.
Phil Kim:
Arti, thank you so much for your time here today. It's been very enlightening and we've enjoyed every minute of it, and I know we'll be in touch so thank you again so much. And thank you all for joining us here on the Health-e Law Podcast.
Contact Info:
Phil Kim
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