December 6: Today on the Community channel, it’s an Interview in Action live from HLTH '22 with Dedi Gilad, CEO, Co-Founder of TytoCare & Monique Reese, DNP, SVP at Highmark Health. They discuss TytoCare’s home-based health devices and how Highmark Health utilizes them for their home health strategy. How is TytoCare able to provide urgent care alongside chronic and primary care? How is Monique utilizing TytoCare’s home-based platform in Highmark Health’s population health strategy? How does TytoCare help providers engage with families on their health journey?

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I'm Dedi Gilad, the founder and CEO of TytoCare, very innovative digital health and primary care company.

I'm Monique Reese,

I'm Senior Vice President for Home and Community Care for Highmark Health.

Alright so we're gonna talk home care and really the gap between just basic telehealth and what could be possible. So tell us a little bit about TytoCare to start with.

Sure Bill. So Tyto started roughly 10 years ago, and we evolved with industry and today, actually last week, we launched the big announcement around the new offering of home smart delivery which actually what you just said. Solving the home delivery gap, I would say, of traditional virtual care telehealth by bringing for the first time the holistic view around the family. Not a specific patient, not pediatric, not adult, not a chronic patient, but the entire family, both to do urgent care, primary care, individual care for chronic disease management, and even preventive care.

So we do, are doing all of those within one platform powered by a very unique kit home device. The kit enables the patients for the first time, consumers, members, patients to do a full virtual visit from home, replicating the clinical side of it, so auscultation of the lungs, the heart, imaging of the throat, the ear, everything together with those programs that we bring on the software side and really allow people to consume and to look for primary care for home in a much more effective way.

Fantastic. So, Highmark I mean, you're multi-state right?

Yep. So we're a national healthcare company.

I learn something on every show so that's fantastic. How's Highmark looking at Tytocare to utilize it?

You know, we're really grounded in our living health strategy and part of that living health strategy is helping to redesign the insurance product, and at the same time partner to redesign the healthcare system. So our partnership with TytoCare is really around bringing in different tech logical companies to help us actually do that.

So we're in partnership with TytoCare in regards to those capabilities from a primary care and home standpoint is a big addition of ours and part of our overall living health strategy.

Living health. So it's, I mean, you talked about living with chronic conditions, you talked about primary care. And you talked about urgent care?

Explain little bit more about how this all comes together. I know it's a platform, but theres devices in the home that help me live with my chronic disease?

Yes they help you do everything from testing

when we say educare we see the primary care journey in three levels, you can still and should when needed, go to a physical brick and mortar clinic, hospital, urgent care, ER if needed. You want more and more to transfer some those interactions to virtual. So if it's 10pm at night over weekend and there is an urgency to, to see a doctor, this is where urgent care is coming in, virtual urgent care, Tyto supports that a lot, reducing the need to go unnecessarily to the urgent care or to the ER and getting the first line of treatment with clinicians from Highmark, from your health system or from physician that are supporting their network, but you can also do a general primary care on your day to day with your PCP. Tyto allows a very easy communication with your own physician. You don't have to go to a doctor in the cloud specifically.

You can also share data and connect with your own physician in the community and have a continuity of care during your life. So we really support all the use cases, all the way from the urgent care at night to the ongoing work on primary care and even chronic conditions.

So, if I am thinking population health. Because Im assuming your looking at population health. How are you utilizing TytoCare in your population health strategy?

So I think there's a couple things. I think if we look at this from a benefit design standpoint, you know, you first have to have within your benefit design to pay for those types of services so one would be how we design different products to ensure that we have the ability for members, patients, families to have access to those virtual capabilities.

I think the second piece is as we develop out solutions that are more in the home environment the technology, the software becomes extremely important to create I would say that convenience but I'd also say if we wind up to the consumerism in healthcare it's another modality to kind of meet the demand of creating a more marketable experience.

Less windshield time, less travel, more real time. So TytoCare is partnering with us in order to deliver some of those capabilities in an individuals home.

So as an employer I figured for me as an individual, but I wouldn't really look at it as an individual, but as an employer this could be a benefit especially given... access... Yeah...

Well, the convenience. So if you think about individuals and the time they miss work to go to a primary care clinic from a bricks and mortar standpoint.

I would like to maybe emphasize on that question, is that today even more important than ever suddenly when you look at the post-covid and economic situation, is that beyond the basic and obviously convenient and great medical service remotely is key, but there are other KPIs that specifically high enough, that I would very strongly with a so market, with their old population, Medicaid.

It's also around ROI in terms of value based care and how can they really make an impact. Those savings of time for consumers and getting the best clinical outcome from home also reduces the cost on the system, reduces the need for more clinicians. You can do much more with less. And we are seeing today and showing today, We've just started the journey with Highmark recently, but we see there's some great results that we also announced around total cost of care reduction.

So a health system that takes value based contract or looking at Medicaid population or health plans. You can see really an ROI benefit as well on total cost of care.

All right. We'll get back to our show in just a minute. We have a webinar coming up on December 7th, and I'm looking forward to that webinar. It is on how to modernize the data platform within healthcare, the modern data platform within healthcare. And I'm really looking forward to the conversation. We just recorded five pre episodes for that. And so they're gonna air on Tuesday and Thursdays leading up to the episode. And we have great conversation about the different aspects, different use cases around the modern data platform and how agility becomes so key and data quality and all those things. So great conversation. Looking forward to that. Wednesday, December 7th at one o'clock. Love to have you join us. We're gonna have health system leaders from Memorial Care and others. CDW is going to have some of their experts on this show as well. So check that out. You can go to our website thisweekhealth.com, top right hand corner. You'll see the upcoming webinars. Love to have you be a part of it. If you have a question coming into it, one of the things we do is we collect the questions in the signup form because we want to make sure that we incorporate that into the discussion. So hope to see you there. Now, back to the show.

So Medicare advantage population. Talk to me about the providers. So, 10 years, I'm assuming you have some provider partnerships.

Definitely, Tyto's strategy, and we are as a concept provider agnostic. I think this is part of our uniqueness. We do not come in with our own provider group. I think at the end of the day a member or patients want to be able to consume healthcare the way they choose.

It's part of the trust, it's part of the technology side of it. And for example, with Highmark you can go in the urgent care side to a doctor in the cloud at night, but you can also utilize their, they have affiliated clinicians group, a large health system, and they own a large health system within them. So we can serve with those kind of clinicians, we can serve with the general telehealth clinicians as well.

We can also allow consumers and members to even share data and connect with their own PCP. So you can roll all the way and really have the democracy as a consumer who you want to work with. Tyto is really easily integrated to all of those providers.

How important is that in the benefit

design standpoint? Where I have a trusted care provider in the market and, i don't know, how importantant is

that?

It's extremely important. I would say the ability to choose is extremely important and affordability I think is where you were going was the ability to make healthcare more affordable. And so obviously they're both very important.

So we talked about ROI, we talked about financials. If all we talked about reduces the cost of care, that'd probably be enough. Are there other outcomes we're seeing as a result of utilizing this?

Well, from my end I think, and this is something that Highmark is highly interested in, is how to take new digital programs in a little bit different approach in terms of defining the right cohort, doing engagement. Tyto is investing a lot into engagement capabilities and how to really make those programs successful.

So it's not enough to give great technology at the affordable price to consumers, you have to make sure that people are aware there is a behavioral change. Certainly with technology like Tyto and you can see post-covid let's be honest, there was a reduction in utilization in traffic to those virtual services.

During covid there was no other choice, so people used it alot. But today you have to make people engage and understand, aware, that this can really to shift their behavior to a certain degree. And we're investing a lot into that.

So adoption is key, but it's a challenge. I mean you're putting this technology into people's homes. You don't have elbow support, you don't have those kind of things, are these devices that simple? Engagement is that simple?

Yes. But of course it was built for families to be consumed in a very, very easy way. And we track everything. So Highmark and our partners can define a journey that says, okay, this is now the winter time we want to educate, we want to promote more awareness to this disease. There's a new covid wave coming in.

You want to be aware of that. There's a new goal in family. There are things within a family journey that you can engage on. So having the technology and easy enough to use that, that's one. But you know healthcare, you don't wake up in the morning and just consume healthcare. You need to be aware that when you need it, it's there.

Okay, so this is part of our engagement programs and we build it and customize it with our partners like Highmark to the right population. So it might be a little bit different on commercial financial, might be different on Medicaid, but it's generally the same concept of those engagement programs.

What are you looking for in terms of outcomes?

We're looking to have care be more affordable. We're looking to create a better experience. I think bringing offerings from a product standpoint that has innovation like TytoCare, embedded and ingrained, and it becomes important because that's part of the benefit that an individual has.

And I think creating our marketable experience is one of the best things I've found to be grounded in.

Experience, We're hearing that a lot at this conference, so. Fantastic. Thank you for your time. Appreciate it.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Another great interview. I wanna thank everybody who spent time with us at the conferences. I love hearing from people on the front lines and it is Phenomen. That they have taken the time to share their wisdom and experience with the community, which is greatly appreciated. We also want to thank our channel sponsors one more time, who invest in our mission to develop the next generation of health leaders. They are Olive, Rubrik, trx, Mitigate, and F5. Thanks for listening. That's all for now.