Decode Health’s Key Takeaways from HLTH 2022

Last week’s fifth annual HLTH conference in Las Vegas was the biggest and boldest yet. The event was overflowing with interesting information and innovative ideas that push to define healthcare for the next decade. Many of the topics discussed tie directly to the work we do at Decode Health. Here are our team’s takeaways:

Value Based Care

The focus on Value Based Care (VBC) has been elusive for almost a decade. It’s no longer enough to promise insights without demonstrated delivery of value. Providers (health systems, providers, physician practices, and others) who are tasked with taking risk in VBC programs cannot participate without access to quality datasets of every type, which they generally don’t have. It’s a no-win situation for taking risk.

Decode delivers the technology platform and decades-long accumulation of know-how to access, create and analyze a myriad of data sources, including genomic (RNA), clinical, social determinants of health (SDoH), lab values, and patient-reported or remote sensor data. We now appreciate that the combination of all data layers leads to the best, high-resolution view of a patient. When the power of these data layers are combined and analyzed effectively, optimal opportunities for providers to deliver on VBC are realized. Pharma stands ready to act on new biomarkers for companion and complementary diagnostics to pair with new therapeutics that provide the right treatment to the right patient at the right time. Diagnostic companies stand ready to deliver proactive, personalized, biomarker-driven testing to support drug and disease monitoring. Decode’s ecosystem convenes all of these players to benefit from the knowledge of the community, accelerating precision medicine and true value for patients.

Health Equity & FemTech

HLTH 2022 set a target squarely on improving health equity. Women at HLTH, whether as entrepreneurs, patients, providers, or investors, focused on all aspects of healthcare delivery for women and their families. The “FemTech” market is expected to grow from $113M in 2013 to $75B in 2025. It’s a subject that is being taken seriously and will be addressed directly by the investor and payer communities.

Decode’s ability to leverage its proprietary approach and decade of know-how to accelerate precision medicine ties closely with the aims of improving health equity. The analytics framework enables patient care to be predictive, proactive, and personalized whether the area of focus is maternal outcomes, reproductive health, behavioral health or disease detection and monitoring for autoimmune diseases, which typically impact a larger proportion of women. The number of solution providers in these areas will continue to increase rapidly, but those who participate in the Decode ecosystem will advance more quickly due to the virtuous cycle of shared research, discovery, and resource sharing. FemTech will eventually go the way of digital health, and those providers who combine forces in a continuum will be the winners.

Radical Collaboration

HLTH attempted, and succeeded, in bringing various stakeholders together to collaborate to ensure a more accessible, affordable, and equitable system. This is noteworthy in an industry that historically operates in siloes.

Just as noteworthy was the announcement by General Catalyst of its new partnerships to bring necessary technology and change management resources to a total of 15 leading health systems, including HCA Healthcare, Jefferson Health, UC Davis, and Intermountain Healthcare. General Catalyst, the backer of successful companies such as Stripe, HubSpot, Warby Parker, Canva, and Kayak, is “all in” on investing and partnering side-by-side with leading health systems to accelerate the journey from “sick care” to “health assurance.” These health systems have concluded the pace of change has been dramatically accelerated, and the future will require a new “tech layer,” driven by vast amounts of data, to unlock discovery, innovation, research, and personalized care – at scale.

Decode Health, itself a leading transformer within the $4.1T healthcare industry, is leveraging the combination of deep scientific knowledge, vast amounts of data, and machine learning capabilities to orchestrate, partner, and participate in ecosystems designed to provide personalized diagnostic and treatment capabilities. The promise of truly personalized healthcare will enable superior treatment journeys while reducing the total cost of care. However, this will not occur in isolation – radical collaboration is necessary among various stakeholders to deliver upon the promise.

The Decode Health team left HLTH energized to keep pushing the boundaries of healthcare innovation, and we are looking forward to the ViVe conference in our hometown of Nashville in March 2023.