ChilCast: Healthcare Tech Talks

In our third guest episode for the Health Impact Project, we invited our friend Grace Cordovano, PhD, BCPA, to discuss the value of healthcare technology from her perspective as a patient advocate. In addition to running her advocacy practice, Enlightening Results, and her startup, Unblock Health, Grace is also involved with the Cancer X Initiative, the Sequoia Project, and the National Academy of Medicine's AI Code of Conduct Project. She also happens to be one of our favorite people to follow on LinkedIn.

During this conversation, Dr. Cordovano speaks to her experiences working with patients, noting the toll of patient administrative work, the impact of financial toxicity, and the role of technology in improving access to care – in particular clinical trials for cancer treatment.

We talk about the value of healthcare organizations from the patients' perspective, where the most important outcomes are focused on reducing suffering and appropriately aligning with each individual's values – making sure to see them as a person and not as just a statistic or their diagnosis. This brought remote patient monitoring, palliative care, and digital tools into the conversation, as these have all been shown to greatly improve quality of life in the right situations.

Most of our discussion can be summarized in one particularly compelling statement that Grace made, and which underlies much of her policy-focused work: anything in healthcare that touches the patient should be aligned with giving that individual a competitive advantage against their diagnosis. This perspective is so compelling and easy to grasp, but not one we hear anywhere near often enough.

Key Takeaways:

• The patient administrative burden continues to worsen and it's clear that only proper regulation will be effective in curtailing this. Just like with provider-facing solutions, this is an area where information technology can be particularly effective in supporting users' needs.
• Better access to clinical trials, and greater diversity in these trials is essential to creating healthy populations – particularly in cancer care and rare disease treatment.
• Remote monitoring and home care are [re-]emerging as particularly effective models of care that improve quality of life, but there are many considerations to take into account in each case when deciding if its appropriate.
• It is crucial for any company or organization touching patient lives to incorporate the perspective of actual patients in the development of their solutions and services, otherwise "patient-centric" is merely lip-service to a current buzzword.