Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Torben Nielsen, Co-Founder of HealthSparq (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The value proposition is very clear and very compelling. I’ve actually talked to the eClinicalWorks CEO Girish Navani. I don’t know if you know him.

Torben Nielsen: I read your article on that. I thought that was very interesting.

Sramana Mitra: He talked to me about this problem as well. I’m very much aware of the issue. It’s something that should happen and should have happened already but hasn’t.

Torben Nielsen: It’s so overdue.

Sramana Mitra: Yes, I agree with that. It seems like it is happening now. It’s a matter of time. Probably by the end of the decade, we will have this in place.
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Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Torben Nielsen, Co-Founder of HealthSparq (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Great. This is very interesting. What percentage of the health plan market has adopted solutions like this such that consumers can access this facility today?

Torben Nielsen: It’s a great question. We do an annual survey here at HealthSparq surveying 1,600 health plan executives. We just completed our second annual survey. What it shows is that health plans really are very interested in these transparency tools. Where they really fall short, oftentimes, is in ensuring that the members really know that this type of data and these types of shopping tools are available to them.

Traditionally, health plans are big and large. They are still very new to the element of consumerism, if you will, and talking more proactively to their members. What we’ve realized at HealthSparq is that a lot of members are asking for this information especially with plans coming out >>>

Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Torben Nielsen, Co-Founder of HealthSparq (Part 2)

Torben Nielsen: You’ll be surprised, that even though everybody’s insured, at how much variation you see in price within just one block of wherever you live. By going to an in-hospital versus a surgical center that’s right next door, you can save thousands of dollars. That’s exciting because it’s almost the analogy that we like to talk about. Remember in the good old days when you wanted to buy used cars. You, as an individual, didn’t have any information. You would walk into a lot and the car salesman would say, “I have these three cars. You can choose between them. One has run 50,000 miles and is 13 years old and I’m going to charge this much for it. The other one is the same model but only ran 25,000 miles and is three years old. I’m going to charge this much.” You had no idea whether that’s a good or bad price until Edmunds.com came about. Then, you started to get all that information as an individual. You started to have just as much information as the used car salesman.

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Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Torben Nielsen, Co-Founder of HealthSparq (Part 1)

The consumerization of healthcare, moving into the 21st century, a Web 3.0 world — let’s discuss these with Torben Nielsen.

Sramana Mitra: Please introduce us to HealthSparq and yourself.

Torben Nielsen: I’m the Co-Founder and the SVP of Products and Strategy here at HealthSparq. HealthSparq is a leading provider of cloud-based healthcare transparency solutions. In essence, it means that we’re trying to change something in an industry that has been very slow at changing. I think healthcare is one of the few, if not the only one, where you don’t really know what it’s going to cost until after the treatment. You go see your doctor and have a treatment done and you have no idea whether that doctor is the right doctor for you. You don’t know the quality of the doctor. You don’t know what it’s going to cost you until maybe 30 days after, you get something in the mail that says, “This is not a bill. This is an explanation of benefit.”

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Eldad Farkash, CTO of Sisense (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Where would you point entrepreneurs to look for new problems to solve a new startup to build now?

Eldad Farkash: If you’re coming from a scientific background, I would say focus either on deep learning or NPI. These would be the two major topics I would focus on if you’re a scientific kind of startup. If you’re trying to solve a problem by combining a stack together, I would try to start from the lower level. I would start looking around and see what hardware and what data sources are not existing yet and how do we tap into those data sources and make something meaningful out of that. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Eldad Farkash, CTO of Sisense (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: There is one area that I think still has some openings. Some of this is very large opportunities but a lot of it is also small to mid-scale opportunities of these vertical solutions that take advantage of the more mature infrastructure layer underneath. But then, you need a serious amount of domain knowledge on top to be able to actually do meaningful things with that infrastructure. Are you in agreement with that statement?

Eldad Farkash: Yes, I do agree with that. I think there is a lot of potential for innovation on how to simplify those huge projects. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Eldad Farkash, CTO of Sisense (Part 3)

Eldad Farkash: Another trend would be regarding the sources of data. Today, we’re just starting to grasp the value of data. What’s missing is more sources. When I say more sources, I’m not talking about the conventional databases. I’m talking about machines and environment. Blending this data into what we do on databases has tremendous impact. I’ve seen only the huge companies able to do that usually because it requires a massive amount of investment in technology and infrastructure. As for the hardware trends in the upcoming years, we expect to see more and more getting squeezed up into smaller machines that can do much more with much less.

Sramana Mitra: Would it be fair to say at this point that the infrastructure landscape and ecosystem is becoming pretty mature or would you say that there are still issues with that side that need to be solved?

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Eldad Farkash, CTO of Sisense (Part 2)

Eldad Farkash: A different example would be Galaxy Semiconductor. I’m taking you to a completely different spectrum. They actually test hardware, usually in Asia where most of the semiconductor industry is. They want to use analytics to crunch billions of records that represent wafer cost. They want to have the visualization that shows them, during the QA process of wafers, how well the wafer is produced. They visualize this by drawing this heat map over the wafer and giving an indication which points are valid and which are invalid. To get this simple picture, they need to go through billions of records and crunch them in real time. We’re talking about asking around 5,000 SQL queries running over a few minutes over billions of records and getting visualization out. >>>