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today in health it Sunday at the health conference.

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My name is bill Russell.

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I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of this week in health.

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A channel dedicated to keeping health it staff current and engaged.

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VMware has been committed to our mission to providing relevant

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content to health it professionals.

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Since the start, they recently completed an executive study with MIT.

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On the top healthcare trends, shaping it, resilience, covering how the pandemic

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drove unique transformation in healthcare.

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This is just one of many resources they have for healthcare professionals for this

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and several other great content pieces.

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Check out vmware.com/go/healthcare.

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All right,

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here's what I've decided to do this week.

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I'm going to do a daily diary from the conference.

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Talk about what I heard, who I ran into.

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What's going on.

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I'm also recording a few short interviews, five to 10 minutes,

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which I will air on the show later this week and early next week.

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And Hey, if you're at the conference, just, I am me through Twitter or

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LinkedIn, I would love to chat with you.

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Today I got here around three o'clock in the afternoon.

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The safety procedures are the first thing that you experienced at the conference.

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Health teamed up with clear that the company that does the airport

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fast pass kind of thing, and impact health to provide the tech user

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experience process and the testing.

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And I will say I was fairly impressed.

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They processed some 2000 people on Sunday and the line was about 20

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minutes long and the test took about 20.

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And I understand that that's 40 minutes, but think about it a hundred percent

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vaccinated and a hundred percent tested.

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It's hard to not feel safe in that environment.

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It makes me feel like wearing a mask might be a little bit of overkill,

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but those are the rules in the state of Massachusetts, regardless of if

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you've created a safe space or not.

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So that is what's going on.

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So we have a hundred percent vaccinated, a hundred percent

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tested, and everyone is wearing.

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The first thing to note is that this conference is a digital

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health innovation conference.

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Most of you, my listeners are not here.

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Investors are here.

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Life sciences is here.

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Pharma is here.

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And any health tech company that is looking for investors in the

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next five years is in the building.

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Don't get me wrong.

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Healthcare companies will be represented, but mostly by those who are making

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the deals on behalf of their health.

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Th the conference we'll have roughly 6,000 people according to their marketing.

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I don't know if that is going to be a combination of digital and onsite,

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but as I said earlier, about 2000 people were tested here on Sunday.

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So the conference feels like it's filling up pretty well.

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I sat in on a couple of the main stage discussions and it's important to

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note that they are not presentations.

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They are discussions.

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Everyone had a partner to bounce the questions off of

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after the opening remarks.

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So following the opening montage of statistics, which was a very

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interesting video worth taking a look at, if you can get your hands on it

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and an opening, , let's say one minute light show in anticipation of the

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start, Jonathan Weiner, the founder and CEO of health got up there and.

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Uh, I acknowledged the contributions of healthcare as

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a community and thanked them.

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He then ran through a couple of stats.

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, 5 million people have died from COVID around the world.

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And one in five have died from COVID in the U S and those are startling numbers

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to be sure he challenged leaders.

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He gave a couple of things.

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I'm not going to give you his whole speech here, but he said, leaders will need to

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become more comfortable talking about.

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And it was due to some of the statistics that he talked about

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that this really has impacted , the minority communities much more so than

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the, , fluent and white communities.

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He said, there's also this, this mistrust of healthcare that needs to be overcome.

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And he would like to see us focus on the root cause.

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And finally, he finished up by talking about defeating, missing information.

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He said one in five, Vaccine is a carrier for a microchip.

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I don't know about that stat that I would love to see where that comes from.

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I I've yet to talk to anyone now.

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That's not true.

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I've talked to one person who believes that this is a bill gates kind of

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microchip kind of thing, but, and I've talked to an awful lot of people.

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So I can, I find that hard to believe.

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I feel feels like the kind of thing that is an urban level.

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But his point of defeating misinformation is, well-made

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The first two to take the stage where Dr.

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Allen Levin, who is an EVP president for CVS Caremark and Chrissy Farr formerly

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with NBC now with OMERS ventures.

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And they had a discussion really around medications, cost of

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medications after they got through some preliminary conversations from.

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And she asked him, what can be done about the cost of that medication?

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And he talks about the things that they do at CVS for their employees.

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And he said, we use a formulary that is a very highly generic.

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He talks about the first thing you have to do is drive generics.

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And he gave some use cases where generics generally, when they become

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generics, the use of those drugs.

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Precipitously and they should, there's still a very effective drugs

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in the treatment of these diseases.

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So he says, drive generics, number one, number two is drive competition.

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And he talks about the fact that when drugs get about seven or eight options

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or competitors, that they see the price drop very rapidly, very significantly.

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So he obviously is a person who believes in the free market.

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He goes on to talk about reference price.

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And, the fact that you could set the reference pricing based on category or

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base it on the U S versus international.

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But he said the challenge is that he believes we're on the edge of

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a major advancement in the cost of development of new drugs.

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And if we go after setting, the reference pricing, we may set it above what the

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market actually sets the price at.

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I have no idea if that's actually true, but it is an interesting.

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Uh, against reference pricing and I'll have to look into

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that a little bit further.

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He was asked about the threat of a player like Amazon, and he opened

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with the phrase, which I think there's a lot of wisdom in one

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underestimates Amazon at its own peril.

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And that's good to hear from him.

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He talks about the fact though that PBMs are pretty well established.

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I mean, there's only a handful of them.

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Well, there's a handful of the major.

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And they have scale.

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And he talks about the fact that scale matters and scale takes time.

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He talks about the fact that people are comfortable with the

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PBMs that they require visibility.

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PBMs have been pushed into visibility by their clients.

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So the clients know that they're making money, but they know exactly how much

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in how and why they're making the money.

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So he said, there's a big barrier for them to.

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But they have a long time horizon.

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They have a fair amount of money and they have a lot of ingenuity.

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And so clearly they are someone to keep an eye on the next two that came onto the

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stage where Ken Frazier with Merck and Heymont Tonasia with general catalyst.

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They had a very interesting back and forth.

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They talked a fair amount about how health equities, and then

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they turned the conversation to.

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innovation in what they're doing in that space.

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In 2019, this was Heymont Tonasia talking.

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He sent in 2019, they went to their partnership and they said, over

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the next decade, we want to make a difference in the healthcare space.

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And they said, , we want to think intentionally about a

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set of companies that can be built to address the challenges.

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And he said everything that we thought we were going to do over 10 years, well,

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probably happen over the next four years.

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And that is due to the COVID accelerate.

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That they have experienced.

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He went on to say a couple of interesting things.

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He said, we talked about disrupting industry with tech, but people

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don't want their care disrupted.

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People want to trust their care provider.

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So that's an interesting snippet right there in and of itself.

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He talked about this idea of building health.

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And this concept of intentionally partnering to build out companies that

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make health care, proactive that reduce the health burden on GDP and make

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care accessible and affordable to all.

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So that's the framework they're looking at to really build out these companies and

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to build out these partnerships really.

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So he drove home the.

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That it's not one company that is going to be doing this, but it's

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going to be companies in concert that are going to be doing this.

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And he left us with this.

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How do we do this transformation without causing disruption?

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We were building companies that can drive out jobs, but we are

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missing an elderly care workforce and a mental health workforce.

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And what he sees is and movement of people around healthcare.

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Address those areas that are underserved today with areas that can be replaced

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with potentially technology process and some other things in the future.

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The last session that I sat through was Dr.

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Karen DeSalvo chief health officer for Google health and Lydia Ramsey

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freelancer with business insider.

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She's the healthcare editor.

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And I love the fact that lydia just asked the question, why the

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reorg what's going on at Google.

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And I love the answer because it gives us a little more insight into what is going

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on at Google and how they think at Google.

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So here's some of the things that Karen DeSalvo had to say, this

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company understands that we have a lot to do to improve medical care,

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but health is a lot more than that.

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So health not healthcare.

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And she says

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the reason for being is to develop better health and quality of life around the

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world, the strategy, all assets of the company, how can we impact millions

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around the world in an equitable way, high quality information to navigate their

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health journey and to personalize it.

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And she talks about the scale of Google and we all know

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there's 600 billion in pre.

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Of our health information since the start of the pandemic care studio and

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AI for healthcare and awareness and context for public health information.

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When asked, do you feel pressured to build this into a business?

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She said, no, we don't.

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That phrase in and of itself is really interesting to me.

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And I don't doubt that that is true.

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And I think Google will figure out how to monetize it later, but they're

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really about the information business gathering information, organizing that

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information, and they will figure it out.

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But that is the world that they live in and they want to

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be preeminent in that space.

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And so for now they're comfortable just saying, Hey, figure out how

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we can build better health in an equitable way around the world.

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And that's how they're thinking.

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I have a lot more questions, I'll let you piece those things together to.

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Think about what the world of Google really looks like, but perhaps in

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the future, we can sit down with Dr.

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DeSalvo and have a deeper conversation on it, because I don't know about

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you, but I have more questions about where Google wants to go with this.

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And what kind of partnerships are they looking for?

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How are they going to partner with healthcare delivery organizations?

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What are they doing around the care experience and care gaps

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and those kinds of things?

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I don't expect them to do that.

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But I'm wondering what the conversations look like behind the four walls.

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Those are my thoughts.

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You're gonna wanna check back as the week continues, I'll drop more of

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my daily diaries and the interviews will start later on this week.

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That's all for today.

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If you know someone that might benefit from our channel,

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please forward them a note.

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They can subscribe on our website this week, health.com or wherever you listen

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to podcasts, apple, Google, overcast, Spotify, Stitcher, you get the picture.

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We are.

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We want to thank our sales sponsors, who are invested in our mission to develop

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the next generation of health leaders.

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Thanks for listening.