RamaOnHealthcare July 15, 2022
A Natural Evolution of Data Collection and Connection
Today, RamaOnHealthcare talks with Anatoly Geyfman. He started Carevoyance, is interested in the deep domain of healthcare and protected information, and how to service that in a way that is reliable and consumer friendly. He believes we are just at the beginning of the data revolution in healthcare.
Anatoly Geyfman, VP, Medical Devices, H1
RamaOnHealthcare (ROH): Tell me about your background in healthcare.
Anatoly Geyfman (AG): I’ve been in this business since I was about 16 years old. I started programming pretty early. HIPAA was passed around the time I was in 10th grade, and I hooked up with a local company that was building the first HIPAA-compliant benefits communication system for employers.
I became an intern, built out a lot of capabilities, then I went to university, and came back to the company to lead a team in 2005. By this point the company had merged with a few others and we built all manner of software dealing with employer and employee information, so lots of protected health information.
By 2009 I was ready for a change, and one of my previous colleagues invited me to help build a medical device for medical imaging. I architected and we built the actual medical device itself, which was a medical image exchange software for radiology. We then began distributing the software to the people who could benefit from it. I started looking at the data and saw a huge need for innovative companies like ours to understand where the opportunities are. I was again ready for a change and started Carevoyance. I’ve always been interested in the deep domain of healthcare and protected information, and how to service that in a way that’s reliable and consumer friendly.
ROH: Having been at the forefront of a lot of innovation, how do you define innovation?
AG: I tend to start with customers or in this case, patients first. Innovation is something of new value that is delivered to customers where there is a win-win. The company benefits from increased revenues, or whatever the economic indicator is, and the customer aka patient benefits from improvement to their life.
Innovation is something of new value that is delivered to customers where there is a win-win.
Much of innovation is finding yourself in the right place at the right time. When I think back on the medical imaging device we created, the timing was very right. I saw what was coming a little before other people. I saw that web browser technology was going to have a huge leap. We built our software with a bet on standards winning over proprietary tech like Flash. Our bet was the technology was going to catch up with the use case.
Much of innovation is finding yourself in the right place at the right time.
Even with Carevoyance, investors used to ask us at the time: How can you be sure that the government is going to stop releasing data? My answer was always: Not only is the government not going to stop releasing data, but we are just at the beginning of the data revolution in healthcare.
When I started Carevoyance, I knew I should go for increased transparency, instead of against it. This is kind of the critical intersection where policy and innovation meet.
ROH: Carevoyance was recently acquired by H1; How do you think bringing H1 and Carevoyance together is going to collectively enhance the healthcare ecosystem?
AG: When I began talking to H1 about an acquisition of Carevoyance, I knew our missions really aligned. What I love about H1’s vision is creating a healthier future is similar to what I envision for Carevoyance – Let’s bring innovation and care to patients everywhere.
Let’s bring innovation and care to patients everywhere.
I thought what H1 was doing around the level and scale of data collection and connection was incredible, so there was a natural fit between Carevoyance and H1.
Carevoyance’s concept is bringing commercialization to healthcare technology. When I looked at H1, their vision was a natural extension which was to communicate medical information and bring more diversity to clinical trials.
I have this picture of the life cycle of a medical product. We are starting to address each phase of the medical product, and I thought it was very exciting to bring our capabilities together and really cover every aspect of what a life sciences company needs.
ROH: At H1, you talk about diversity and equity within clinical trials. If there’s anything beneficial that came out of the pandemic, it’s that it forced the hand of healthcare to take a closer look at fixing the glaring gaps in access to care for underserved populations. How do you think this applies to the medical device industry?
AG: I think inclusion and diversity have played a huge role in the way medical device companies think about the patients that they treat.
I think inclusion and diversity have played a huge role in the way medical device companies think about the patients that they treat.
The way healthcare gets paid for has to do with who receives it, and is what I am really excited to look at through the medical device lens. For example, I like to think about how we are going to change payment models for treatments in a way to enable affordability for patients and also brings innovation to people who need it most.
Value-based contracting is also exciting! The idea is that a medical device or pharmaceutical should be judged on the outcome it produces and not the inputs. I think the opportunity for all of us in this space is thinking about how we change these payment models and move our industry towards value-based care. The result will be treatments that are available to more people.
ROH: What do you believe is in store for this industry in the next five years?
AG: I think there is definitely a move to value-based care, care delivery, and payment models. It is exciting because we are finally setting a path for healthcare in such a way that if we want to collect information, it’s now possible. I think wide-spread data availability is about how you measure patient outcomes, not individually, but at scale.
We are looking at how we integrate this into contracting, how premiums work, and how this interacts with the outcomes we want to produce. If we can be at the forefront of understanding how to create these value-based agreements and evaluate the patient outcomes, I think we can be a huge agent for change.
About Anatoly Geyfman
Anatoly Geyfman has dedicated his life to creating a healthier future. As the VP of Medical Devices at H1, his mission is to grow H1’s products for commercializing healthcare innovations. Prior to H1, Anatoly was the Founder & CEO of Carevoyance, where he led the team to build and commercialize an analytics platform for Medical Technology companies. Carevoyance was acquired by H1 in 2021. Prior to Carevoyance, Anatoly was the Chief Architect at Ambra Health, where he built the first cloud-based platform for exchanging medical imaging studies between physicians, hospitals and patients.