Interview in Action @ HIMSS '23 - Tahir Haque, MD, Senior Medical Director, Biofourmis
Episode 9221st June 2023 • This Week Health: Conference • This Week Health
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interview in action from the:

Special thanks to our cDW, Rubrik, Sectra and Trellix for choosing to invest in our mission to develop the next generation of health leaders.

You can check them out on our website this week, health.com, now onto this interview.

right. Here we are from PIMS:

Old school. We keep it old school.

Keep keeping it old school. Give me little idea of what Bioformis does.

Sure. So Bioformis is a technology enabled Care delivery company. So what that means is we're able to take a modular technology and services offering and enable care in the home

Okay, you're gonna have to take it further than that for me to get a so it's a platform to enable me To extend into the home and do care in different venues and different care areas But how does it do that and what is the problem?

We're trying to solve for healthcare?

Sure, so As care shifts more and more into the home post pandemic. What we've realized is there's four main components to that care or delivering successful care in the home. One is the clinical care. So how is the doctor and the nurse actually seeing the patient and taking care of them?

The second is in home services. So all the wraparound services that need to go into take care of a patient such as a blood draw or an x ray or something as simple as a physical therapy visit. The third The third the technology layer. So how are we monitoring folks in the home and being able to respond to their concerns and communicate with them.

And then the fourth is probably the most important, but how are we getting paid for all of this and scaling those programs.

So, who is your client? Is your client the health system, or is your client the payer, or is it the actual patient?

It's a mix of all of the above. So we work with health systems. We work with payers as well as provider groups.

And then interestingly, we have a side of our business, which is also focused on the entire drug life cycle development process. So we also work with pharmaceutical customers.

Interesting. So do you have providers as part of what you do?

We do. So what we've seen in care at home is a lot of health systems are struggling with the staffing shortages.

And what we've done is build our own virtual clinical care team that has providers, nurses, and health navigators that are then able to go and provide that care to the patient and augment a care that a health system may not be able to provide.

So, you said virtual care team. So you're not dispatching people to the home at this point?

We do not dispatch bioformance employees to the home, but we do work with partners that offer that last mile service in the home in different markets.

Alright, so I'm a former CIO for a health system. Okay. who do you normally have a conversation with when you go to a health system to talk to 'em about a partnership or some sort of activity with them?

Depends on the health system. It's often time either somebody in the informatics office, like the cio, the chief medical officer, or what we've seen more and more with our larger health systems is their dedicated virtual care program staff that are interested in deploying such a solution.

And they will, they will essentially engage you.

When they come to you, what's the problem that they can't solve themselves?

Right now, they're working out of a lot of disparate solutions, so different solutions that are siloed to provide that care in the home. And as we figured out very quickly is that the EMR is great for providing care within the brick and mortar facility, but hasn't extended yet quite into the home.

So bridging the gap between all of those different solutions.

So your solution allows them to essentially make connection points to all those, those four areas that you were talking about before.

Exactly. So what I would think of us is as a patient management and care coordination tool.

Interesting. All right, so you come to me, I'm the CIO, we sit down, we, I mean, I would think you're having a conversation with our, ] home based care. A lot more health systems are talking about this. And they're saying, look, , we've got to push care outside the four walls. As they're looking for that, to push outside the four walls, what are some of the challenges they're going to run into as they try to do it?

Obviously, we have disparate systems. Are there other challenges in delivering care?

Absolutely. So one major challenge that we have is health systems are a little inexperienced with delivering care outside of the four walls. So figuring out the best entry point for some that's, I want to do hospital at home or acute care at home.

And for others, it's. I don't want to start off with the most acute patients, but rather on the other end of the spectrum, which is the chronic care patients.

So you help them figure out who, and then do you help them with the how as well?

Absolutely. So then we sit down and figure out what in the existing health system resources can we say is in source and available to provide care for your care at home program and what then needs to be outsourced.

We'll get back to our show in just a minute as we celebrate our fifth anniversary At this week, health, we've partnered with Alex's Lemonade Stand of Foundation, combating Childhood Cancer. And I've just been floored by the generosity of our community. We set a goal to raise $50,000 this year, I wasn't sure how we were gonna hit it.

And we are already up over $34,000 for the year, and we want to thank you for being a part of that. This June, as you know, we've been doing drives all year, and we're gonna do something a little different in June. We have 2 29 groups where we bring together healthcare leaders, about 10 to 15 of 'em in a round table format.

And we discuss the biggest challenges facing healthcare and how technology can be applied to those challenges. We have an event in June and together with our chairs of that event, our participants and our sponsor partners, we're gonna be donating $5,000, to the cause. We really want to thank our chairs.

For that event, Jeff Sterman and Chad Brisendine. Jeff Sterman with Memorial Healthcare. Chad Brisendine with St. Luke's University Health Network, for being a part of that. We want to thank our sponsor partners order, Gordian Dynamics Clear Sense rubric. Sure test VMware and Nuance for also being a part of raising that $5,000.

And we wanna thank you again for your generosity. If you wanna join us this week, health.com, you can click on the Alex's lemonade stand banner on the homepage and you'll get taken to our lemonade stand. You can go ahead and give directly onto that page and see some of the other people who have given Now back to our show.

And what's the hardest part of the, how? \ I mean, I would think the logistics of this is pretty daunting.

Absolutely. So, when we take a step back and look at all of the services that go into the home, it's over 15 different services. So, in addition to the provider and the nurse, it can be a phlebotomist, the mobile x ray technician, the therapist, like we touched on, food and nutrition services, infusion services, just to name a few.

So, you're not just selling me a technology platform. Are you selling me the services to essentially stand that up as a health system?

Exactly. What I want to provide your health system with is the solution that's tailored to your specific needs to enable your care at home program.

So how are they, how are they different is it different based on the communities that we serve and the communities that we're going into?

I would say, so the biggest two groups that I would say is the rural health systems and urban health systems. And they each have their own unique set of needs. And then if you further fragment, let's just say the urban population, it could be academic medical centers, large health systems which comprise of multiple hospitals or a single hospital entity that's providing that care at home.

Yeah, and that, it's interesting when you talk about home based care in rural settings. I think about just the geography that you have to cover and what not. I would assume a lot of that is virtual, isn't it?

Absolutely. Absolutely. And so what we find is, for example, I work as a hospital at home physician in Boston, and our geographic encatchment area is 10 miles from the hospital.

Once you transition to the rural hospitals, Bioformis has customers that serve patients that might be 50, 60 miles out from the hospital, sometimes even further.

And you can still dispatch those services to those locations?

Yes, we can. So what we find is perhaps in the urban setting, we're able to work with one, maybe two vendors.

But in that rural setting, maybe you need three to four different providers in that same specific service to cover that entire encatchment area.

We talked about the demographic that you're serving. But, one of the things I've heard about the high acuity care in the homes is that only like 40% of the homes.

can't really accept high acuity care. They don't have the

prerequisites to deliver that kind of care in that kind of setting. Is there some of that at play as well here?

There is. So equity is a huge portion of care at home and how can we build an equitable model of care that can serve all, so not just the typical traditional urban population. And so what we've done at Bioformis is really focus on having a solution that does not require existing infrastructure in a patient's home besides the physical home and a safe place to treat them.

We're able to bring them a cellular enabled tablet and connected devices so that we don't have to rely on the patient's Wi Fi. We've also designed our technology such that it appeals to a broad set of patients as opposed to one specific subset and really thought about technology literacy in our solution.

Do we end up with more touch points with the patient? Is it more of a health model? than a sick care model in this, as we set this up?

Absolutely, and I would like to, highlight as we move down the care continuum towards more of this post acute and chronic care patients. This is where I think of this as more of a health model rather than treating the acutely ill patient and really intervening before and preventing that deterioration which causes them to go to the hospital.

That's fantastic. Any, any questions I didn't ask? I'm just curious.

No, we really think about care at home and all of the fragmented solutions that come with it. And what we're seeing now is companies really start to focus on how can we unify. the different services into one platform. So what Bioformas has recently done is design a tool where we can take and order all of those 15 different services that I mentioned to you through our dashboard and then track those services all the way to completion, which we really think will help providers.

That's fantastic. Pierre, I

want

to thank you for your time.

Thank you so much, Bill.

    Another great interview. I wanna thank everybody who spent time with us at the conference. I love hearing from people on the front lines and it's phenomenal that they've taken the time to share their wisdom and experience with the community. It is greatly appreciated.

We wanna thank our partners, CDW, Rubrik, Sectra and Trellix, who invest in our mission to develop the next generation of health leaders. Thanks for listening. That's all for now.

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