NCQA Digital Summit Interview of Kevin Pereau by DJ Wilson, part 1
Chart for us what it is we are talking about when we say Digital Health One point O, 2 point O and so on:
DJ
Let me just ask you first, sir, you’ve been thinking about this innovation question, this sort of conversation between policy makers in the market who’s moving fast, who’s moving fastest for a long time. Set a baseline for us to begin about what you think Digital Health 1.0, Digital Innovation 1.0 was; Digital Health 2.0, Digital Health 3.0. Chart for us, what we’re talking about here to begin:
Kevin
Sure. First of all, thanks for having me, DJ. It’s always a pleasure to see you. It’s good to see you again, I feel a little bit better. I thought they maybe flew you to to to Greece for this session. And I missed out on an email early on, but. All right. You’re on holiday. I, I think that’s a great place to start the conversation. Digital health really hasn’t been around all that long.
It’s really about about 10 or 11 year evolution. And over that time, I think what we’ve seen is a change in the way people think about how we use the data that we’ve been capturing for decades in health care. I always describe digital health one oh as a time when we really exploded some popular myths. I remember when I was first raising capital for my first digital health startup company and I was literally talking to the CEO and chairman of the third largest health plan in America.
Kevin
And he told me that, you know, digital health will never work. Members are the problem. They won’t engage, they won’t share, and they are not willing to be really held responsible or accountable for their own health. And I think what we did is we just exploded a lot of myths about what people will and won’t do. We were wrong about a lot of our assumptions. We will engage. We just have never really as an industry, provided our members, customers, patients, whatever you want to call them, the kind of tools that we started providing with them about ten years ago.
I think the first wave of innovation really was all about apps you saw an app for everything. In fact, we used to joke that “there’s an app for that”. People downloaded them. They used them. I think the naysayers at that time were quick to say, oh, they’ll never sustain that. But another surprise and shock, we did! Um… That lasted probably about three or four years. I think the next wave was really all about the rise of and the proliferation of devices.
We sometimes call this the quantified self movement or the era where big data discovered health care and there was a platform for everything. So if you look at that time, it was really I think you could best summarize it this way. The smartest guys in the room were still looking backwards and saying, I can tell you what just happened. Right. And I can tell you why. And I ended my last book, The Digital Health Revolution, with a bold proclamation (at the time) that we’re finally turn the corner, we’re taking a forward look.
I think maybe the predictive analytics engines kind of kicked that off. But we really started thinking about, all right, well, how do we start taking action on this data? I mean, what good is collecting data if we’re not going to reuse it? So I literally ended the last book with, hey, that’s where we’re at right now. There weren’t a lot of companies that were really giving us the opportunity to take action on our data.
But I think that’s changing. And I think right now we’re on the cusp of Digital Health3.0, which is where, you know, if I’m sharing my data with you, I expect you to do something with it to help me solve a real world problem that I have, or else I’m going to stop sharing it with you. And I think that’s where we’re at right now. So we’ve evolved our thinking from just passively putting information into a big would be storage cabinet to, all right, where can we connect this with a stakeholder who can help us out?
This is the first of a four part interview of Kevin Pereau at the NCQA Digital Summit held virtually July 13 – July 15, 2021 by DJ Wilson.
Kevin Pereau is the founder and principal of TranscendIT Health, a boutique health care strategy and management consulting firm focused on helping health care payers, providers and consumers get maximum value from their digital health technologies. He is the author of the soon to be published book, “It Takes a Village”. You may also know Kevin from his highly successful book titled “The Digital Health Revolution”.
D.J. Wilson, D.J. is the founder and CEO of State of Reform. State of Reform covers state health policy in 15 states and convened some of the largest health policy events in 20 markets across the country.
