In this episode, we interview Vik Bakhru, MD, former COO and CFO of ConsejoSano and the founding CMO of Circulo Health. We discuss some of the challenges that ConsejoSano faced as they strove to build consumer trust in the medical system amidst the global pandemic and what’s in store for Circulo Health, the nation’s newest managed Medicaid plan. Founded in 2014, ConsejoSano provides patient engagement tools to payers and providers to help them better connect with their multicultural Medicaid/ Medicare patient populations. Vik seeks to bring his learnings from ConsejoSano to Circulo Health where, along with their partner Olive, they hope to create a differentiated experience for Medicaid beneficiaries. Circulo Health raised their Series A in early 2021, led by Drive Capital and General Catalyst with participation from Oak HC/FT and SVB Capital.

In this episode, we interview Afton Vechery, CEO and Co-Founder of Modern Fertility, a reproductive health company making personalized fertility information more accessible. We discuss Modern Fertility’s founding story from getting to the first 100 users to finding the best GTM strategy and building the proactive fertility category from scratch. Founded in 2016, Modern Fertility is the women’s health company making personalized, proactive fertility information more accessible to women everywhere, whether they are trying for kids or not. Modern Fertility raised their Series A in 2019 from Forerunner Ventures, First Round Capital, Maveron, and many other leading investors.

Neil Batlivala is the CEO and Co-Founder of Pair Team. Neil Batlivala and Cassie Choi, RN founded Pair in 2019 after experiencing how critical a high functioning administrative team is to provide high-quality primary care by building out operations together at leading tech-enabled practices of Forward and Circle Medical. The majority of healthcare is local and fragmented, and no solutions were built to enable existing clinics. Pair came out of that need and provides a simple yet comprehensive solution that covers the front, mid, and back-office. Their automation, along with a human-in-the-loop approach provides end-to-end operations of patient outreach, scheduling, e-forms, care gap reports, record requests, referrals, lab coordination, etc., to offload the traditional job functions of the front desk and medical assistants. Pair Team (“Pair”) came out of stealth in December 2020 and raised $2.7 million in seed funding backed by Kleiner Perkins, Craft Ventures, and YCombinator, along with other prominent funds. Neil is an engineer, YC alumnus, and co-founder of Pair Team. He has spent the majority of his career in healthcare and had the honor of working with some exceptional people while building remote medical teams at Pair Team, opening primary care practices at Forward, designing medical devices at Spect, training machine learning models at Noxon, and researching pneumonia at UCSF. Neil completed his undergraduate studies in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. In his own words, he is 50% thrill seeker, 40% dad jokes, 15% math.

In this episode, we chatted with Dan Knecht, M.D., M.B.A., Vice President of Clinical Product at CVS Health. Prior to this, Dan served as Vice President of Health Strategy and Innovation for Medical Affairs at Aetna, a CVS Health company. What we discussed: The CVS Health-Aetna merger in 2018 has enabled the joint company to create more customer-centric care by marrying advanced data analytics across Aetna’s ~21 million members with care management and better access to healthcare for consumers via CVS Health’s extensive retail presence. CVS Health balances localized care with national scale by developing products and services that address the needs of specific patient segments while continuously improving clinical product design through broad data analytic capabilities and a robust feedback cycle from providers and patients nationwide. CVS Health continues to invest in digital offerings and homecare services to meet the patient wherever they are in their healthcare journey. CVS Health is also expanding its virtual care, chronic care and behavioral health services in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, to meet consumers where they are and support them for every meaningful moment of health throughout their lifetime.. COVID-19 has spurred CMS to expand its definition of healthcare, resulting in reimbursement for a broader range of services, including transportation, nutrition, and telemedicine. These changes will likely persist and benefit patients’ health in the long run.

Dr. Andrey Ostrovsky is the former Chief Medical Officer of the US Medicaid program. He is now the Managing Partner at Social Innovation Ventures where he invests in and advises companies and non-profits dedicated to eliminating disparities. He also advises federal and state regulators on how to incorporate human centered design into policy making. He previously operated a series of methadone clinics in Baltimore, Maryland. Prior to working on the front line of the opioid use disorder crisis, he served as the Chief Medical Officer for the Center for Medicaid and CHIP Services, the nation's largest health insurer, where he advocated to protect the program against several legislative efforts to significantly dismantle the program. He also led efforts to streamline Medicaid and make it more customer-centric. Before leading the Medicaid program, he co-founded the software company, Care at Hand, an evidence-based predictive analytics platform that used insights of non-medical staff to prevent aging people from being hospitalized. Care at Hand was acquired in 2016 by Mindoula Health. Before Care at Hand, Dr. Ostrovsky led teams at the World Health Organization, United States Senate, and San Francisco Health Department toward health system strengthening. Dr. Ostrovsky has served on several boards and committees dedicated to behavioral health, interoperability standards, quality measurement, and home and community based services including the National Academies of Medicine, National Quality Forum, Institute for Healthcare Improvement, and the Commonwealth Fund. Andrey holds a Medical Doctorate and undergraduate degrees in Chemistry and Psychology Magna cum Laude from Boston University and is a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Andrey completed his pediatrics residency training in the Boston Combined Residency Program at Boston Medical Center and Boston Children's Hospital where he was a clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School. He is currently teaching faculty and attending physician at Children's National Medical Center.

In this episode of The Pulse Podcast, Vivien interviews Andrew Parker, CEO and Co-Founder of Papa, an on-demand assistance service to help people and their family members stay independent while living securely and happily at home. Andrew has a passion for healthcare, technology and people. Prior to founding Papa, Andrew ran Health Systems Sales and Strategy for MDLive.com, a large tele-health provider, where he was one of the first 15 employees. In 2017, Andrew founded Papa with the goal of supporting older adults and their families throughout the aging process. Today, Papa has grown to over 220 employees and over 15,000 Pals on the platform working across the nation, in all 50 states. Papa has raised $18M in Series B Funding in late 2020 from Comcast Ventures, Canaan Ventures, Initialized Capital, AirAngels Syndicate and more.

In this episode, we interview Dr. Jon Bloom, the Co-Founder and CEO of Podimetrics. The company’s mission is to improve patient lives through early detection and prevention of diabetic foot ulcers. They are a virtual care management company dedicated to preventing diabetic amputations through their SmartMat product and partnerships with both payers and at-risk providers, including the Veteran’s Health Administration. The company was founded in 2011 and has been backed by Norwich Ventures, Rock Health, Scientific Health Development, and Polaris Partners.

In this episode, we sat down with Brad Fluegel, lecturer at the Wharton School’s Health Care Management program and former Senior Vice President and Chief Healthcare Commercial Market Development Officer for Walgreens. Before that, he was the Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy and External Affairs Officer for Wellpoint, now Anthem, and Senior Vice President of National Accounts and Vice President of Enterprise Strategy at Aetna. What we discussed: Consumer behavior shifting to online purchasing combined with excess retail space is driving retailers such as Walmart and CVS to explore opportunities to leverage consumer familiarity with their brands to expand their presence in the growing healthcare industry. Retailers, providers, and payers are exploring the tradeoffs of different models for expanding into healthcare, from partnering to investing to build out independent outpatient health centers. Collaboration amongst payers, providers, and retailers may drive cost and care benefits for consumers while increasing health equity amongst disadvantaged populations. Near-term policy changes on allowing lower level healthcare practitioners to administer care currently dispensed by doctors as well as insurers considering maintaining pay parity for in-person and remote services should persist after COVID.

In this episode, we connect with Erin Lee, the VP of Global Operations and Managing Director of Babylon (U.S.). Babylon is a London-based telehealth startup leveraging AI to provide quality and affordable primary care around the world. Babylon has operations globally, including in the U.S., Canada, UK, Rwanda, and several countries within Asia and the Middle East and plans to continue expanding internationally. Since its founding in 2013, Babylon has raised $635M in funding to date from investors such as Centene, VNV Global, and Google DeepMind. Most recently, Babylon rallied $100M in Series C funding in September 2020. We discussed: Babylon’s mission to make healthcare more accessible and affordable globally by combining cutting-edge AI with best-in-class clinical care to reduce excess administrative costs and enhance practitioners’ ability to administer quality care How Babylon's capitated care model to manage holistic patient care is delivering proactive healthcare over sickcare, and how Babylon is utilizing its global knowledge and understanding of all of the external risk factors that can impact a person’s health, such as their environment and unmet social needs, to treat the whole person The impact of COVID and the rise in digital health providers and its impact on the consumer Professional and leadership advice on working across diverse, international teams

In this episode, Vivien interviews Naomi Allen, CEO and Co-Founder of Brightline, a behavioral health care technology company delivered for families and children. We discuss her amazing journey at the forefront of the new digital health wave as one of the founding team members of Castlight, her leadership lessons as Chief Growth Officer Livongo and the amazing story of Brightline and how they launched months before their plan to serve families during the COVID and behavioral health pandemic. In 2019, Naomi founded Brightline to reinvent the way behavioral healthcare is delivered for children and families. Brightline is delivering integrated care through innovative technology, virtual behavioral health sciences, services, and collaborative care teams focus on supporting children across the developmental stages in their families. Most recently, Brightline raised $20M Series A funding led by Threshold Ventures and Oak HC/FT.